TV Highlight of the Fortnight: The Boys on Amazon Prime

It isn’t as if we needed confirmation that peak superhero has been achieved. But we received it nonetheless at Marvel’s recent over-stuffed Comic-Con panel. The sight of Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hiddleston and Mahershala Ali on stage together, figuratively joining hands, was irrefutable evidence that the caped crusader craze is in danger of maxing out. How many more costumed crime-fighters does the world require?

But now, in the best way, comes the backlash. HBO’s forthcoming adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen presents us with the superhero as preening psychopath. Much the same message is conveyed by Amazon Prime’s small-screen retelling of Garth Ennis’s The Boys, which has just debuted on the streaming service.

In the universe of the Boys, superheroes are crime-fighters, Instagram-influencers and sports stars rolled into one. They crack skulls. But they also star in their own movies, have merchandising lines and, as the story gets under way, are campaigning to be allowed participate in US military operations abroad.

They also have some very, very dark secrets. Off stage, with the lights out, they’re a walking, talking class lawsuit. Sexual assault, gross incompetence, cruelty and vanity – it’s all in a day’s work for frocked fighters such as Homelander (a stand-in for Superman), Dark Noir (Batman), The Deep (Aquaman) and their chums.

Most despicable of all is the aforementioned Homelander (Antony Starr). He’s the leader of “The Seven”, an Avengers style crew of elite “supes”. A vacancy in the ranks has opened the way for smalltown superhero Starlight (Erin Moriarty) to join. She soon learns the Seven’s wholesome conceals an icky secret life.

Among the biggest sinners-in-secret is A-Train (Jessie Usher). He’s a bit like the Flash, only with an out-of-control steroid addiction and an unfortunate tendency to run into and kill members of the public when out and about. He’s just cut through innocent Robin – to the horror, grief and, understandably, abiding anger of her boyfriend Hughie (Jack Quaid) . Hughie is now gunning for the Supes. In his corner he has uber-geezer Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and their fellow rag-tag of “boys” – idealistic Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), fast-thinking “Frenchie” (Tomer Capon) and the murderously psychopathic but otherwise pleasant “Female” (Karen Fukuhara).

“Determining that the superheroes would be a bunch of shits was a no-brainer, it was just a matter of temptation and corruption,” said Ennis, a long-time superhero hater, in a recent interview. “The Boys, on the other hand, I saw more like actual people – flawed, uncertain, prone to certain excesses.

“Hughie is essentially a decent wee guy with a couple of serious blind spots, but his total inability to change his nature, like most people in real life but very few characters in comics, is actually what Butcher’s counting on to save the day.”

The not so subtle takeaway from the series is that we’ve had too many superheroes lately and that perhaps it’s time we questioned our fealty to Marvel and DC.

“It’s hard to say that we’re in a period of superhero burnout when Avengers makes $2 billion, but I do think that we’re reaching an interesting stage where people are starting to analyse and deconstruct that myth, which is what I think we’re doing,” said show-runner Erik Kripke. “For the record, I’m a fan of those movies. I like them without any cynicism. I’m in line for all those movies. But they speak to a myth that’s not particularly honest; that someone with that type of power would only be benevolent. That’s just not true.”

The goal, Kripke explained to Screenrant was to meaningfully and truthfully convey what life would be like if superheroes walked amongst us – for them and for us.

“What if superheroes were really in our world?… Every bit of absurdity comes from that, these totally absurd elements of the superhero myth. It’s ridiculous that somebody talks to fish. It’s just fucking stupid. That’s just one easy example. We let any comedy or absurdity emerge out of the natural contradictions of putting a fantasy element in the real world.

“And so when those people have to take shits and go get tacos, it just gets funny. But by the same respect, we kept saying, that this is the real world. No one was allowed to pitch a joke that was just a parody of another superhero or just a gag because it had to live. From the very beginning, we were very, very aware that it had to live as its own world and have its own integrity and credibility. If it came off like some Naked Gun version of a superhero show, we’re dead.”

• The Boys is on Amazon Prime.