Control: The Boys…

I, Dalton Lewis, don’t normally do reviews, but this show changes a lot of my perspective on superhero shows so I wanted to discuss it. The Boys is a television show in which the superheroes are not perfect. Some of them are diabolically evil, some are pretty great, and most are somewhere in the middle.

In The Boys Hughie is a normal person whose girlfriend dies tragically — killed by a superhero in a tragic superspeed accident. He meets Billy Butcher, a normal man who polices superheroes, or supes. Billy Butcher has a team, with Frenchie, Mother’s Milk, and Kimiko. They get together and try to police the supers as the supers are trying to be good people and mostly failing.

The complexity of the villains impresses me. They are fascinating and sometimes likable. They have real compassion and feel for the people around them. In particular A-Train is a corporate sellout who accidentally killed a person or two, but he doesn’t want to kill innocents or anything — things just go bad.

The Deep sexually harasses the new member of the team. He doesn’t mean to do anything wrong, right? He gets sent to Ohio, which to him is a hell. He drinks and drinks and regrets his life. I feel for that person, strangely. I understand that he hates himself and didn’t intend to do anything wrong. Still his crimes are unforgivable.

Homelander is the leader of the Seven, and he is evil. He loves his son, but he’s evil. He protects his own, but he’s evil. He can be super nice and stop countless bad guys, but he also kills and frames people when it is convenient to him. These villains are sympathetic and fascinating to watch, as they destroy lives, level airplanes, and wreak general havoc all around them.

Why do we like this superhero show? I blame Garth Ennis, a wonderful comic book writer who created a marvelous universe in which to play. He created difficult moral grays and characters who are sometimes great and sometimes terrible — and a world in which the main characters can’t beat the supes in a fight. Homelander probably won’t ever lose a fight to Hughie after Hughie does a training montage. This story doesn’t work in that conventional way — instead it shows flawed characters sometimes winning and sometimes losing.

Let’s face it — we love celebrity, and this show analyzes that. We love to watch our stars in their outfits and their interviews and their movie premieres and the like. We love them no matter what — and sometimes they are evil. I’m glad that a show can take advantage of that.

Thanks, and take care, friends.