‘The Boys’ is the perfect superhero story for our screwed up world

I never read The Boys, and I honestly don’t care to after watching Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s adaptation of the comic.

It’s not that I wasn’t a fan; quite the opposite, in fact. But The Boys, the one that’s now streaming on Amazon, is such a modern and aggressively human take on superhero stories that I’m worried about getting to know these characters in some other medium and spoiling everything.

The eight-hour first season — I pray there are more, because wow what an ending — introduces a world that actually gives a shit when superheroes screw up. The heroes themselves are untouchable corporate entities, but The Boys fixates on the collateral damage that tends to trail superhuman hijinks.

Take Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid). He was just trying to enjoy a tender moment with his girlfriend Robin (Jess Salgueiro). But when she accidentally stepped into the path of high-speed superhero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), she ceased to exist. A-Train ran right through her, leaving a stunned Hughie covered in blood and holding his dead girlfriend’s severed hands.

That moment doesn’t just set Hughie on a season-long path of revenge. It also sets up the world that The Boys lives in. This isn’t some sanitized story of do-gooders taking on a great evil. The characters you’re meant to side with are deeply flawed, and the story’s biggest jerks are sympathetic in unexpected ways.

In other words, everyone’s just a person. They celebrate victories and they hurt when things go badly. They act irrationally, driven by emotion. They think and feel, and they don’t always connect the dots or make exactly the right choices. As much as this is a work of fantasy fiction, the grounded plot and its frequent twists that riff or comment on the world we live in is a rock-solid anchor.

The world of The Boys feels natural and believable, like something we ourselves might see if superhumans suddenly walked among us. It remembers that there are people behind the masks, and people are corruptible. There’s a layer of honest cynicism that you just don’t see very often in modern superhero stories.

The show’s Justice League-like team known as The Seven is a great example. They’re not an independent operation at all. Rather, they’re products — I mean “products” literally here — of Vought International, living an existence scripted by the company’s PR and marketing teams.

We come to understand all of this through the eyes of Starlight (Erin Moriarty), née Annie January, a new addition to The Seven. She’s a young and idealistic Christian girl from Iowa, new to the big city and overwhelmed by the magnitude of this opportunity she’s been given. She’s served a harsh reality check on day one when The Deep (Chace Crawford), this show’s fish-talking Aquaman knockoff, uses his sway as a celebrity superhero to coerce her into a sexual encounter.

The magic fades further there as Annie realizes what a farce this hero gig can be. One fellow team-member’s biggest concern is the income lost when his movie is pirated (yes, there sure is a Vought Cinematic Universe). Most of the team worries more about optics than righting wrongs. Annie’s first patrol is preceded by a literal crime itinerary that she reads off a tablet screen.

The Boys remembers that there are people behind the masks, and people are corruptible.

Hughie is immediately presented as a sympathetic character, a guy to be felt for after his girlfriend is unfairly killed by a careless act of superhumanity. His brief, unwanted time in the spotlight sets him on a path to meeting Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), who wants nothing more than to wipe out all the supes — that’s The Boys shorthand for superheroes, just so we’re clear.

Butcher’s full history isn’t clear until later in the season, but it’s immediately evident that he’s on his own quest for vengeance. He finds in Hughie a willing and easily influenced ally, and together they go on to enlist two other familiar faces from Butcher’s past: Frenchie (Tomer Capon) and Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso).

The real magic of The Boys is in the unfolding story. Very little of what you learn about each of the major players in the first episode is still true by the end of the season. We ultimately come to understand that Butcher and The Seven leader Homelander (Antony Starr) are two sides of the same coin: driven by deep convictions, absolutely certain that they’re in the right, and open to embracing unconventional tactics to get what they want.

Their performances are similarly tremendous. Urban should be a known quantity to most, but his gruff delivery and ability to go from sweet to scary in an eyeblink make him a powerful presence in every scene. Starr’s performance is a slower burn, but the payoff of watching his true character reveal itself is one of the season’s most delicious rewards.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you that Homelander is ultimately shown to be a villainous figure. That’s revealed outright in the season premiere. But the true nature of his character — the lengths he’ll go to, the secrets he keeps, and especially, the contrast between his public persona and his private one — is deeply disturbing for how familiar it all is. Strip away the superhero fantasy stuff, and Homelander could be one of the figures we read about in The Washington Post every day.

If Urban and Starr are the season’s two sides of the same ideological coin, Quaid and Moriarty are the emotional bedrock. Their chance encounter and the relationship that develops from there shapes everything that follows in Season 1. In this show where no one is really innocent, the performances from these two bring constant reminders that people, supes or not, can learn and grow from their mistakes.

Generally speaking, The Boys boasts a dynamite cast. On The Seven side of things, both Crawford and Dominique McElligott, who plays the Wonder Woman stand-in Queen Maeve, are woefully underused but play pivotal roles in the ongoing story. By the end of the season, they’re fully rounded-out people.

The same goes for Butcher’s titular squad. Capon and Alonso initially read as one-dimensional stereotypes — a scheming Frenchman and a loud black man — but the unfolding story lets us peek into their true depths. As with Crawford and McElligott, the two characters shine by the time the eighth episode’s credits roll.

I love all of these characters and want to understand each of them better. It’s hard to like a lot of them, but there’s so much humanity written into the script that I feel like I know them after my eight-hour binge. That’s why I’m so dead-set on skipping the comics. The Boys has an important story to tell about our modern world in 2019, and it’s the only version that I want to know.