"The Boys"...

Anyone here a fan?

Yup

Watched the first 2 seasons and the cartoon spinoff, will start on Season 3 and Gen V soon.

Meh. Season 1 was good. 2 was decent.

By 3... it just felt like they were stuck in the mud doing the same things over and over.

Love The Boys and Gen V. It's over the top but still works for me. 
 

I am fan of Invincible as well. Season 2 just came out and waiting impatiently for the 2nd half of season 2 to be released. 

Completely insane, over-the-top and ridiculous. Also a biting satire of corporate greed, the news media, big pharma, politics, you name it. I love it.

Loved just how rapidly it went super dark and twisted.  Had a few slow spots and stopped watching but it's on the list of shows to get back to.  Currently in the throes of the Handmaiden's tale on Hulu.  Super dark.

I like the season 1 only.

overall I like it - but some of the coorelations to real world political leanings they work into the story are kinda hard to look past.

Luckily, the fun premise and solid acting helps get me over that hump.

I dig it, for sure. Gen V isn't as strong but I'm enjoying that as well (will likely finish S1 this weekend). I do like the rather unflinching look at "what if supes were just forked-up people" rather than the assumption that superpowered humans would all be either paragons of righteousness or outright villains. 

It def went over the edge for me......I haven't decided whether to watch the latest series or not.

We really liked Seasons 1 and 2.  Season 3 went to a level of raunchy I didn't think was possible.  I'll still watch Season 4 I guess but this may be the last one I'm willing to watch. 

Huge fans, here. Wife and I went into GenV kind of half-heartedly, thinking it would be a YA take on The Boys fit for the CW, but it was more of a YA take on The Boys fit for Cinemax after 11pm circa 1993. 

And Marvel should have locked all their writers and executives in a room and showed them that series over and over until they realized that it's entirely possible to do a shared universe where each story is compelling and still has stakes and impact on the bigger picture. 

But, yeah, if you don't like exploding genitals, this show may not be your cup of tea.

We watched the first season and enjoyed it, but for some reason never got back to watching season 2 or 3. 

3 episodes into Season 3 and it seems at least as good as previous seasons so far...

Haven't watched GenV, but enjoyed all 3 seasons of The Boys.

Anyone like to explain what it is, for those of us who don't have a clue?  I thought you were talking about the new movie coming out The Boys In The Boat.

Superheros are regular people with super powers.  They are flawed.  They become celebrities, the cave to peer pressure, they become obsessed with the fame and spotlight.  They have agents and exclusive contracts.  The difference between good and bad is a lot more gray than in the marvel world.

ProDarwin said:

Superheros are regular people with super powers.  They are flawed.  They become celebrities, the cave to peer pressure, they become obsessed with the fame and spotlight.  They have agents and exclusive contracts.  The difference between good and bad is a lot more gray than in the marvel world.

I'd say that 'Watchmen' had super heroes as regular people. 'The Boys' is more like...

What if POS celebrity narcissists detached from regular life - e.g. James Cordon, Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, etc. - had super powers. And when one of them *literally* slaps the face face off of the Starbucks barista because they didn't make her half-caff, double foam, venti, pumpkin spice, machiatochino with sprinkles *exactly* right - their corporate public image team jumps in with the power to cover it up, pay people off, or intimidate them with legal action so the general populace can continue to idolize their "heroes".

Now imagine exactly how gory it would be if Superman literally slapped the face off of a barista.

Then there's a group of normies who wants to murder all the supes because of it.

Even better, it's more like a look at what having superpowers would realistically do to a person. The supes aren't celebrity narcissists who happen to have superpowers, they're celebrity narcissists in large part because they got superpowers - in some cases because of how they got them.

Edit: To expand a little more, we see a range of possibilities. You have a spectrum from Starlight, who managed to become a decent person despite having superpowers, to A-Train who's more of a middle-of-the-road option where the power has got to his head but he can see it to some degree, to (minor Season 1 spoilers ahead!) Homelander who is a world-class psychopath in large part because of how he got his superpowers.

^Agreed.

In Watchmen the super powers aren't quite on the same scale, except for Dr. Manhattan and Ozzymandias, both of whom also have extreme intelligence which tempers their vanity/narcissism/etc.  The others do become celebrities, but cant get away with the sheer insanity of the boys because they aren't superman like.

I do think that if normies could get superpowers on that scale, a lot of the E36 M3 you see in The Boys would become a reality.

Blew through the rest of Season 3, I'd say it holds up to previous seasons although while the storyline was entertaining, it is a bit "more of the same" and the climax kind of turns into a setup for the next season. It does leave a helluva setup for Season 4 though and it filled out a lot of the backstory getting there. If you didn't like the real-world political parallels, well those got turned up from 5 to 10 over the course of this season and it looks like the next one will start at 11.

I finished watching Gen V and it might be more interesting than The Boys at this point - it was off to a bit of a slow start but it soon picks up pace and there are a lot of big twists and reveals in store. It also adds to the mystery of Victoria Neuman's motivations and gives a hint at what's coming in Season 4, which seems to be a realistic look at where contemporary politics would go in a world with supes. Supes that aren't smarter than any ordinary human (I think the closest we've seen to superintelligence in the The Boys/Gen V is Gunpowder's clearly superhuman ability to aim and calculate ricochet trajectories, or perhaps A-Train's ability to think at super-speed) but are actually physically superior in a way. So buckle up...

I don't want to spoil anything, but by the end of Gen V a very interesting Magneto-like supervillain is revealed. The way this character hid the true nature of their powers also reminds me of Aizen from Bleach. I expect and hope that some of these characters will be introduced in Season 4 of The Boys and Gen V was a way of giving them a backstory.