Gen V and The Boys are finally reimagining the superhero genre

The moment is now Gen VThe Gen Z spin-off of X-rated Superhero satire The BoysThis actually surprised me. I’m going to talk about what that moment was, but first I need to talk a little about what it wasn’t.

The moment when, two minutes into episode one, a young girl with her first period accidentally killed her parents using telekinetically weaponized blood was not that. That sequence, which serves as our introduction to the show’s protagonist, Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), is altogether typical of the tone and attitude of the Boys The universe is a gleeful, Grand Guignol parody of superhero violence that winks and groans at us while simultaneously nauseating. It is, after all the place The BoysThe landscape of superheroes media has been carved out. Amazon released the show at the height of superhero saturation in 2019. Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Shazam!, Spider-Man: A Faraway Home,There is a seemingly endless number of planned and imagined franchise movies. In that environment, the foul-mouthed, cynical spit-take of Eric Kripke’s show — which imagined “supes” as half-witted, media-obsessed stooges of the Vought International corporation — could only feel like a welcome relief.

The year 2019 feels like a lifetime away. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, changing tastes, and an almost improbable degree of genre oversaturation, the past year has given us one dud after another that struggled to get audiences even to glace momentarily upward from our phones — whether it was the catastrophic performance of DC’s The Flash or the hollow, empty streaming network thud of Marvel’s Secret Invasion. To that end, Gen V’s joke ought to feel played out at best and pointlessly mean-spirited at worst, and to some extent it is. Despite its predictability, the joke is still funny. Gen V remains perplexingly engaging television, and it’s worth asking ourselves just why that is. Why? Gen V A franchise which began life as a satirical pastiche of comic book superheroes has shown itself more open to the pop culture than it intended to mock. Maybe by understanding the premise of it. Gen VIt is possible to save the superhero genre from death, if we understand what it feels like.

[Ed. note: This post contains light spoilers for the first few episodes of Gen V.]

Photo: Brooke Palmer/Prime Video

So, to return to Marie, whose salvation from a life of shame and poverty is admission to the prestigious Godolkin University, a training ground for the nation’s supe elite. This usually means low-rent celebrities with superpowers. Soap opera actors, TikTok Influencers, Brand Ambassadors and so on. But a rarefied handful make it through the school’s crime fighting program to become genuine, certified superheroes — even members of elite team The Seven. Marie has an entirely unreal goal.

That sets up the show’s premise, which follows Marie alongside her classmates as they attempt to navigate the school’s cutthroat social environment, and it sets up this show’s first clear distinction from its predecessor: These kids, by and large, just don’t have what it takes. The Boys is a show about muscular ego and genetically enhanced social domination — the big dogs who know just how big they are, duking it out to lord over a world that loves them.

That’s where the kids of Gen V want to be, but it’s clear from the get-go that the vast majority will never make it. They’re too vulnerable, too needy, too desperately eager to break free from the constricted worlds they come from — whether it’s metal bender Andre’s (Chance Perdomo) reticence to match the performance of his superpowered parents, shrinking YouTube star Emma’s (Lizze Broadway) pressure from her overbearing stage mom, or Marie’s desperate fear of falling back into poverty and the specter of prison. The supers are Gen VThey all know that they are trying to escape their pasts. Godolkin University student, who You can also read about how to get started.The word “directly” is a verb that means to evoke. The BoysGolden Boy – aptly called and administratively favored – is abruptly and shockingly eliminated by the conclusion of the premiere episode. Gen V, it’s clear, doesn’t spend much time sympathizing with the overdogs.

This show, which is a cape-fiction, has a keen awareness of reality, including class. The show’s frequent gags about compulsively checking follower stats and filming Twitch videos feel like the laziest sort of Zoomer dunking. It becomes clear that these characters, like us, feel trapped by media industry. Emma desperately wants to escape the routine of performing in front of the public, yet she is aware that this would only lead to her relegation to the shadows. Jordan (played alternately by Derek Luh and London Thor) can’t contain their jealousy over Marie’s unearned fame and success, even when they know they ought to know better. Even the school’s steely, hardass Dean Shetty (Shelley Conn) sadly confesses over a few too many drinks that she, too, is at the mercy of Vought’s corporate pressures: Slack one moment in her duty to farm out the students for fundraisers, and Godolkin will have her out on the street.

Photo: Brooke Palmer/Prime Video

Photo: Brooke Palmer/Prime Video

That’s not to say that Gen VIt’s not necessarily good television, nor does it want to be. It is done with the same nuance and subtlety as a CW teen show from early 2000s. Each of the kids has a power that conveniently serves as a handy metaphor for some universal element of puberty or adolescent trauma: Marie’s murderous power manifestation is, of course, a dramatized nightmare of a first period. Emma’s shrinking is powered by a compulsive need to vomit — a behavior she repeatedly, and unconvincingly, denies is an eating disorder. Jordan’s power as a (literal) gender-bender actualizes trans and genderfluid identities. And so on, in ways that make the term “on the nose” seem anatomically subtle.

Indeed, Gen VIt is owed as much by Youssip GirlThe following are some examples of how to use RiverdaleThe untouchable soapy grandeur of Cruel IntentionsIt is as it appears to be Avengers It’s strangely refreshing to feel that cultural debt. Gen VThe film draws from other genres that are culturally important, outside of the superhero world. This is something most cape films have given up. In 2008 Iron Man could cite as its inspirations 1980s action films and early-’90s slacker comedies. By 2023 the biggest influence will come from Ant-Man & the Wasp – Quantumania seemed to be… Ant-Man. Instead of feeling trapped by self-referential obligations franchise, Gen V The show sidesteps these sources in favour of others that are equally trashy. And in a curious way, that actually gets the show closer to the tone and effect of the superhero media that ostensibly inspired the show in the first place: the Legion of Super-Heroes or the Chris Claremont’s X-Men, ur-texts of the superhuman teen genre, which used powers as devices to explore relatable high school and college turmoil. Breaking away from its genre’s conventions, Gen V It is returning to its roots

That brings me back to my earlier shocking moment. It isn’t any of the show’s spattered viscera, or exploding phalluses, or creatively vulgar exclamations that would make the characters on DeadwoodTake a pause. It’s a scene, midway through the fifth episode, when two characters tenderly and affectionately sleep together. It isn’t funny, and it isn’t salacious; it’s just raw and honest, and, in its own way, more sex positive than most teen dramas that have come out in my lifetime. It’s also briefly, blissfully free of irony, self-awareness, or the burdens of genre satire. In our exploration of superhero media we have returned to where it all began: something completely vulnerable and human.

Photo: Brooke Palmer/Prime Video

And come to think of it, that’s the arc of every classic superhero, teen or grown-up alike, from Spider-Man onward. Learning to choose truth and do the right thing, even when every pressure from society urges you toward self-aggrandizement and cynicism, is what makes a supe into a superhero —that’s something new for The Boys, and it’s something everyone else seems to have deliberately forgotten in the name of IP maximization and test-marketed screenplays. The one of the Gen V kids sums it up effectively later in the season: “That’s shitty. I hate to see it… But right now you have a choice. Finally, you have the option to choose. So wake the fuck up!” Somehow, improbably, the Boys franchise is surviving by reinventing the same building blocks the superhero genre started with.

Having only seen six of eight episodes, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see these stabs at sincerity and heroism go due south in the end; this is a show based on a Garth Ennis universe. But even if it does, it’s been fun to watch this show imperfectly, and maybe even in spite of itself, find something about superheroes that still feels worth holding on to. If you lose that perspective, your next work of cape-fiction might as well come from Vought.

Three episodes are available. Gen VPrime Video has now added new episodes. Each Friday new episodes are released.