‘The Boys’ Are Back in Town for Season 3

Satire is hard. The key is to show us an exaggerated version of a real-world situation and make us look at it in a different way. Good satire doesn’t need to beat us over the head with its message because it can get across what it needs to say in a subtle way. While much of the third season of Amazon’s hit series The Boys does give us cheeky, clever satire, it can get bogged down with wheel spinning and clunky storytelling that keeps it from being as good as previous seasons.

Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and his band of anti-heroes are back, but the gang is more fractured than ever. Hughie (Jack Quaid) is working for congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) at the Bureau of Superhero Affairs, where he contracts out work to Butcher, Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) like they’re superhero ghostbusters. MM (Laz Alonso) has retired and is trying to live a simpler life and spend more time with his daughter.

At the same time, Starlight (Erin Moriarty) is rising up the ranks in The Seven and is asked to help smooth over Vought’s recent PR problems. As you might imagine, the unhinged and extremely dangerous Homelander (Anthony Starr) isn’t exactly thrilled to share the spotlight, but he’s still dealing with the fallout of his relationship to Stormfront (Aya Cash).

On Vought’s side, Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) is cooking up all sorts of shady corporate dealings, including the manufacture and sale of a new form of Compound V which will give anyone superpowers for 24 hours. As you would imagine, this comes into play in a big way throughout the season.

When The Boys launched on Amazon in 2019, the world was coming off the biggest superhero property of all time with Avengers: Endgame and audiences were ready for some subversive comic book programming for grownups. We’d see the PG-13 world of Marvel where the good guys always win and it was time to release the weirdos and bring in some violence and adult themes. The Boys was right there to answer that call, along with a few other comic book shows aimed at adult audiences. 

Yes, we’d seen other what-if-superman-but-bad characters before, but Homelander was immediately captivating and truly terrifying as a villain. He represented so much about what was wrong with real society: the corrupt men in power who present a heroic image to the public, but are actually total monsters in reality. The second season, which aired during the global shitshow that was 2020, really amped that up by having him fall for a Nazi and start endorsing bullshit racist ideas like white genocide. 

Season two was clever and biting, but at times a bit hard to watch because the real world was almost equally horrendous to what was being presented on the show. Where’s the fun in watching a bunch of Nazis rallying behind their corrupt, vile “hero” on TV when you could turn on the news and see it going on in real life? The biggest strengths of the season came from poking fun at social media influencers or corporate feminism (“girls get it done”) in ways that were very on-the-nose, but still cleverly executed.

The challenge with season three is that the real world is still pretty shitty, but the show just doesn’t seem to have that much new to say about it anymore. It feels like there are more little quests than in previous seasons, more get the thing to help you get the other thing. There’s lots more gore, more moments of “look at these bad people doing bad things” for the sake of shock value, but not a lot more cleverness or commentary on the real world. The messages have become as subtle as a sledgehammer and some of the plot lines feel like they just lead us in circles to no real payoff. 

That’s not to say that there aren’t some great moments this season. Quaid, in particular, has unseated Urban as the true MVP and Starr really owns that menacing quality that makes Homelander so terrifying and simultaneously captivating. There are genuine laughs too, especially at some of the wildly over the top moments that make you appreciate that a show like this exists and has a decent enough budget to pull off most of its ambitions. 

With a stronger start than ending, season three of The Boys is worth checking out, but it’s probably good that Amazon only released the first three episodes because it can be so mean-spirited and nihilistic that it’s not the kind of enjoyable watch you’d want to binge.