Hacker Cinema
The Boys
2019 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Eric Kripke
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventure
A group of vigilantes known informally as “The Boys” set out to take down corrupt superheroes with no more than blue-collar grit and a willingness to fight dirty.
23 positive5 negative5 mixed27 neutralfrom 60 commenters
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64 comments on Hacker News
Most of this article is tilting at windmills. It's notable that they present a number of examples of minority villains pre-woke, and then decry that that can't happen anymore because of woke, but they also stop presenting examples.
Like, they show Giancarlo Esposito from Breaking Bad, saying what a good villain he was. And then they imply it can't happen again. But he was another fantastic villain in The Boys, which just ended its run.
> It means that if a black woman in a wheelchair shows up, you know exactly what role she’ll play; the supportive best friend, but never the lying, betraying femme fatale.
Maybe, but the real source of this is: black women in wheelchairs rarely get any parts at all.
Maybe I don't watch enough movies, but I don't think this page makes a good enough case that it's actually happening. As it is, it reads like something they thought up to get angry about.
A lot of them praised The Boys right up to the point they realised it was making fun of them. They took years of the TV series to get it.
Even for English speakers, the subtitle experience with pirated movies is often lacking. Movies with non-English-speaking characters are often meant to have subtitles for their dialog and not for English speakers by default, but many pirated versions don't do this. I recently saw discussions online of a lot of people saying they had no idea that there were supposed to be subtitles for the aliens in District 9 or the mute hand-signing girl in The Boys.
Sounds like an episode of The Boys.
I think you might be over-fixated on a very prediction-market-esque framing of this plot device... if you broaden it slightly, the idea of someone in a fictional world manipulating the news reporting of an act or set of acts, rather than caring so much about the root act itself, is as stated before, quite common.
For example, this from House of Cards: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/arts/television/house-of-cards-season-4-episode-6-recap.html?unlocked_article_code=1.T1A.50wr.Pr_LeKa7xeiz&smid=url-share
> Pollyhop is a fictional, Google-esque search engine that according to Leann’s polling expert is being exploited by the Republican candidate Will Conway in ways that suggest Underwood can’t possibly beat him in the general election. The explanation of how Pollyhop works is convoluted at best, but the gist is that Conway and his people are manipulating search engine results so that only positive coverage of their side appears.
Or more recent examples of what essentially boils down to the plot device of "media manipulation" aka manipulating the "news reporting of the act":
- See the most recent season of Industry, which included several plot points about manipulating news coverage as a short-seller and the company being targeted fought back and forth (including specific focus on the individual journalists involved)
- See Andor, everything about how the Empire twists perception of what's happening on Ghorman, leading up the Ghorman massacre itself, and then culminating in Mon Mothma's speech in the Senate denouncing "the death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil"
- See The Orville, a particular episode: https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule which includes the plot point of hacking that society's "master feed" to plant false manipulative stories to curry public favor and save a character from being punished
- See The Boys, how Vought manipulates the media to twist coverage of their "heroes" even when they commit atrocities
- See other House of Cards plotlines involving Zoe Barnes and being a direct mouthpiece for Frank Underwood
I think the only real difference if any, is that in the most common form of portrayal, maybe less attention is paid to the journalist as the point of leverage, and how they deal with threats or bribes or whatever. The fact that such manipulation occurs, is commonly accepted as a trope, without requiring too much of a deep dive. Whether a story choose to focus on the "reporter's perspective" is perhaps less common, but not uncommon IMO.
Amazon Prime is the same way. Thanks for paying, please watch ads for first two season of The Boys. Also look at this catalog of movies you can rent for an additional fee.
The "low-cost airline" style of business.
That list of movies is just the movies that Amazon Studios has been the distributor for via Prime Video. Amazon didn’t necessarily produce or fund all of the movies in that list. It’s a bunch of cheap movies that are likely meant to be loss leaders for Prime Video subscriptions, which is something that very much does fit the style of Amazon. Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV all have a similar list of D-tier garbage just to fill their catalogs.
On the contrary to your points, Amazon has put out some pretty solid and well received original series. The Boys, Gen V, Fallout, Reacher, Mr and Mrs Smith, Invincible, have all done really well if not been hits.
Games is pretty trash though. I think they’re also going for a loss leader strategy there, but the platform they’re trying to promote (Luna) just isn’t there.
> One of my most crank opinions is that superhero stuff is (a) for kids,
You must not have seen The Boys (Prime Video) :-)
>
> ... there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like.
Maybe has the same problem that changing super-hero movies has - you make less money.
The movie Killers with k-Something-Heigl, that guy from The Butterfly Effect and Tom Selleck was a rom-com that I enjoyed, but AFAIK it wasn't as popular with females as standard rom-coms, and wasn't as popular with males as action movies.
> Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions.
That's not why people see movies, though; I might find that entertaining, and you might find that entertaining, but it's a pretty hard sell if if doesn't make enough money.
There was a large section of The Boys viewership that didn't understand that Homelander was a bad guy until season four, or that Walter White was Breaking Bad's biggest villain.
Time after time, an astonishingly large number of readers and watchers assume that main characters are good and are unable to fathom that a main character can be bad. Luckily for the rest of us, this is emotional shibboleth that once identified serves as a high-accuracy litmus test for personal engagement.
Lots of film production goes on in Toronto, I especially love how Roy Thompson Hall always shows up in anything vaguely sci-fi. Vaught headquarters in The Boys, U.N. headquarters in The Expanse, it was even in the background of a few scenes of The Handmaid's Tale.
Regarding the last paragraph, I'd recommend the feature film "Mystery Men" and the graphic novel series "Astro City." The Amazon TV series "The Boys" also covered this ground but did it a little too ham-handedly for my liking.
> They are competing with other entertainment. They are competing with other TV and movies. The only thing they aren’t competing on is the exact show.
I.e. the only thing they aren't competing on is the one that matters.
Shows are not substitutable. If I want to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I won't be interested in watching Mandalorian or The Boys instead. Especially if I've already seen the other two.
My two favorite hidden gems are Patriot and ZeroZeroZero. They also did Outer Range, A Hero (movie), Red Oaks, Good Omens, and Mozart in the Jungle.
The Boys and Invincible are both excellent, but more “mainstream” shows.
The Boys/Invincible are generally at the top of the Most Watched lists on Prime when they release new episodes.
Bundling should be regulated in general. It's similar to Microsoft 365 jacking up the prices by claiming they're adding more "value" with products / features no one asked for.
I use almost nothing else from Amazon besides free shipping (they used to have Amazon Music which was pretty good, but now they limited the number of skips); I watch The Boys but I'm sure it'd be cheaper to buy seasons / episodes a-la-carte.
>A sad thing, some what related to this is there's nothing worth pirating now a days. Every single movie or TV show is bad these days.
I get you, but I disagree. "The Boys" and "Invincible" are amazing shows IMHO. Great writing, great directing, great VFX, top cast delivering great performances. There's probably other great stuff out there but I don't have time to invest in finding and watching more.
It's mostly big-name Hollywood productions that suck nowadays because of their terrible unoriginal writing focused around present day identity politics(South Park's famous jab at Disney's focus to "put a black chick in it and make her lame and gay!") coupled with the lazy and excesive use of VFX, but there's plenty of gems coming from the European(Nordics, France, etc) and Asian cinemas than nobody ever hears about unless you go looking for them. Especially Korea has been knocking it out of the park in the last few years.
Foreign(from the US pov) cinema is killing it because they're not stuck chasing to milk existing franchises to death but cand afford to actually be original and take risks with new material, compared to Hollywood who's now the McDonalds/Starbucks of the entertainment industry, focused on selling bland predictable content at massive scale with insane marketing budgets, chasing profits.
Mid-show ads is more than enough to cancel Prime. Mid-video ads on youtube made me all but stop watching it on mobile. But I'll probably wade my way through S4 of The Boys and S2 of Invincible before doing so since they're both coming up in the near future. But this 100% explains the 2/4 premiere date for the last of Invincible episodes.
Same day and overnight delivery are something I never needed or wanted. 2-day delivery was nice, but now it's random. Amazon prices are no longer all but guaranteed to be competitive and buying directly from the manufacturer is often the same or lower price. Prime(sic) goeth before the fall I guess.
I guess I need to finish expanse season 3 at least. Nothing else really worth watching on it anyway. Meh to power rings, and NFL Thursday is over anyway by Jan. What else do they have? The boys?
How comparable is $3 a month to the ad revenue they might make from the shows?
Apparently Amazon Prime accounts get a median of 300 minutes per week of view time. That’s 20 hours of TV a month with (in the order of) a few hundred ad slots I am paying to not have to watch. Amazon are making a penny per unwatched-ad from me.
Contrast with broadcast TV: Good Morning Britain wants £4k for an ad slot in a show that has 500k to 800k viewers so that’s a CPM also in the order of a penny [edit: ahem, £5, not a penny] paid for by the advertiser, for 1000x views.
So, even taking into account Amazon’s targeted ads vs broadcast TV ads, they can indeed make a lot more money from withholding ads than if they show them?
We could call their bluff. Maybe they don’t have any ads to actually show for which advertisers are willing to pay significant fee. But if the business model is to get consumers to pay Amazon to make the pain go away then they’d probably just show 90 seconds of screaming at the start, middle and end of every episode of The Boys.
Per their email:
An update on Prime Video
Dear Prime member,
We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.
Prime is a very compelling value. Prime members enjoy a wide range of shopping, savings, and entertainment benefits, including:
More than 300 million items are available with free Prime shipping and tens of millions of the most popular items are available with free Same-Day or One-Day Delivery. Access to exclusive and broad streaming video content (including Prime Video exclusives like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Boys, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Citadel, The Wheel of Time, Reacher, and The Summer I Turned Pretty, as well as blockbuster movies such as Air, Creed III, Dungeons & Dragons, Candy Cane Lane with Eddie Murphy, and exclusive live sports including NFL Thursday Night Football). Access to Prime Video Channels, which provides an unmatched selection of subscription channels like Max, Paramount+ with SHOWTIME, BET+, MGM+, ViX+, Crunchyroll, PBS KIDS, NBA League Pass, MLB.TV, and STARZ—with no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Customers only pay for the ones they want, and can cancel anytime. The ability to use your Prime shopping benefits—like fast, free delivery, a seamless checkout experience, 24/7 live chat support, and hassle-free returns—on online stores beyond Amazon.com with Buy with Prime. Exclusive deals and shopping events like Prime Day. Ad-free listening of 100 million songs and millions of podcast episodes with Amazon Music. Prescription medications as low as $1 per month and fast, free shipping from Amazon Pharmacy. Access to unlimited eligible generic prescription medications for only $5 per month (including free shipping) with RxPass from Amazon Pharmacy. High-quality health care from One Medical for only $9 per month (or $99 annually), with the option to add up to five additional memberships for the family for only $6 per month (or $66 annually) each. Free two-hour Fresh grocery delivery on orders over $100 (and delivery charges between $6.95 to $9.95 for orders less than $100), and in-store savings on select groceries at Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market stores across the U.S. Unlimited photo storage with Amazon Photos. Gaming benefits with Prime Gaming. More than 3,000 books and magazines with Prime Reading. A free, one-year Grubhub+ membership trial valued at $120 per year, offering unlimited $0 delivery fees on orders over $12.
And, you can expect additional features and programs added in the future for our Prime members.
As mentioned above, no action is required from you. If you wish to sign up for the ad-free option, you can click here. And, as always, if you have questions about your Prime membership, you can manage your account here.
Thank you for being a valued member of Amazon Prime.
Sincerely, The Amazon Prime team
The Boys nailed that episode where the two superheroes enter an out of control plane and discuss how to change its trajectory mid air.
Imo the root problem to most if not all the issues that he’s citing is time. There’s usually not enough screen time to show the minute details like that. This is why TV is so much better than the movies now. None of his criticisms would apply to TV. Stuff like The Boys is already out there.
The other big issue is sales. PG and PG13 tend to have much larger sales due to larger audiences than R rated movies
Is there anything wrong with that ?
Their 'Infinite resources and big property given to random nobodies'(LOTR) or 'big creators given infinite resources to create a no-name property'(Woody Allen - Miley Cyrus show) both failed. Their big hits have been episode-1-viral TV shows like The-Boys that they could fun risk free or established brain-dead guaranteed hits like The-Grand-Tour.
Netflix & Prime need to start learning from HBO. Running a sustainable subscription business is a tried-and-tested model. But, their obsession with establishing monopoly through loss-leaders means they will never reach monetary-sustainability as long as they're in their 'growth' phase.
This is peak "uber vs lyft" where everyone was getting hyper-subsidized rides while both were bleeding money by the million.
> Nowadays the energy, ingenuity and talent that would have gone into making smaller films is instead going into making premium TV.
I hate this. I think 80-110 minutes is a good amount of time to tell a story. It's enough time to develop characters and build a world, but it's short enough that to be effective a film has to be ruthlessly edited.
Stories for TV are so bloated. Series like Stranger Things, Servant, The Last of Us and Russian Doll would have been perfectly suited to the movie format, but instead they get padded out to 8-hour seasons.
I should note I don't think this is true of all series, by any means. Lots of stories are well suited to the series format, like Succession, Dahmer or The Boys. And I know my opinion won't be a popular one because the runaway success of long bloated stories shows us which way the winds are blowing.
Terrible example- Amazon has nothing AAA.
Rings of power looks and is written like a cheap SyFy series. No-name actors, shoddy costumes, horrendous writing. I have no idea where their money went, but money!=quality.
The boys was good and went to shit.
Invincible was alright, supposedly season 2 is coming 'some day'.
By the time they bought The Expanse it had fallen off a cliff.
Netflix and amazon are not worth the subscription to me and haven't been for a long while.
I know, right? This line in particular got stuck out at me:
> They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov.
Never heard of Chris Marker or Rimsky-Korasov, had to look those up. Chris Marker looks like an indie French filmmaker who 60 years ago made a 27 minute time travel film called La Jetée, using only still photographs, that William Gibson apparently considered one of his greatest influences. So yeah, this sounds like something that most mainstream people wouldn't be aware of or into and exactly the type of thing a film nerd or film hipster (who he said in the opening paragraphs were all killed because of how annoying they are) would be into.
And Rimsky-Korasov is a Russian classical music composer who's been dead for over 100 years. Someone that only a music nerd would probably be aware of nowadays, or go see a concert for.
If he didn't want to be such a hipster about it, he could have used like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick and Mozart or Bach or even Debussy or something, a name most people would probably recognize, instead of these less recognizable names, especially in an article where he's making fun of nerds for being into obscure shit (while "their" movies have been dominating the box office for well over a decade at this point).
I'm not trying to defend Marvel here either. I don't think they're the best movies ever made (I thought Everything Everywhere All At Once was the best movie I've seen since Parasite, and considering it pretty much swept the Oscars this year, and Parasite did a few years before that, critics seem to agree with me there).
Another quote that stuck out:
> The culture we produce on Planet Nerd has nothing to do with desire whatsoever. Everything is sterile, mercilessly unsexy; no eroticism, not even visual pleasure.... Nerd culture, meanwhile, is basically quite boring to consume. Instead of the sadistic fantasy of being a superhero, doing fantastic things that ordinary people don’t get to do, the Marvel movies are about nothing more than themselves.
Sounds like someone needs to watch The Boys or Invincible. You'll get your sadistic power fantasy there. (I mean, just watch The Boys episode about 'Herogasm').
Marvel can't do that because it has to get parents to take their children to see them to make all the money. You don't see sadistic power fantasies about being a wizard in Harry Potter either, or overly sensual things with any Disney movie, barring the hidden 'SEX' in flower petals in Lion King.
Batman, and superheroes in general, have always been a bit of campy fun. The target audience was children, like the comic books they were based on. It wasn't until The Dark Knight that anyone took Batman seriously. That really seemed to break the seal on the "gritty, realistic superhero" genre. The trouble with that is that in the real world, the existence of superheros would be horrifying (an observation satisfyingly deconstructed by The Boys). Perhaps we can overlook that for a movie or two, for the novelty, but after a decade and a half of wall to wall "gritty, realistic" media depicting violent anarchistic ubermensch as the good guys, one has to wonder if this is entirely healthy.
Idk why anyone would pay for prime anymore. They have 1 mediocre but popular show (The Boys) and pretty much nothing else relevant. There’s a decent old movie selection, but most are rentable a la cart for $3.
And the shipping is never 2 days. I’m not even convinced it’s faster than non-prime shipping.
And certainly no one is doing it for the music service.
I'm surprised that Snow Crash hasn't been adapted yet. As others commented, most of Neuromancer's plot has become recycled by what came after. But Snow Crash is to cyberpunk what The Boys is to superhero movies: a satirical take on corporate America. This should be especially popular at our current moment with the impending collapse of Meta's Verse (I refuse to let them own "metaverse")
After watching The Boys season 3 I thought I was losing my listening comprehension of English. Glad to hear even native speakers struggle with modern movies. Karl Urban is great, but he just grumbles into his beard.
>14 languages for closed captioning
Look at "The Boys" with regards to 'closed captions' (hint 30+). It's good they translated the TV shows, and drawing conclusions about its target audience out of that is dumb.
<<What of these is more important?
You put me in a difficult position. I don't really watch movies anymore ( Joaquin's Joker was ok ). I rarely get into shows ( I was amused by Boys ). I still read a little. That said, I can absolutely guarantee you that never have I ever in my entire existence on this planet read something and thought to myself "If only Geralt was black, or at least a gypsy, the world would be a better place" for several different yet related reasons:
1. It is supposed to be my entertainment and not a social project ( or more accurately, it can be both, but entertainment should be the primary consideration; after all, if I pay, I expect some value )
2. I do not accept the assertion that it does make better place for underrepresented and disadvantaged people. Right now, it is actually making it worse. You may not be seeing it, but counter-culture is rejecting it pretty hard and that is with all the internet censorship in full swing ( granted, currently for corporate reasons, but censorship is censorship is censorship ). If anything, this hamfisted approach creates a whole new generation of actual racists.. I do not think that makes for a better place for "underrepresented and disadvantaged people".
I don't buy the binary framing either. To me, neither is important.
I think Amazon Prime did censor the first scene from the Boys season 3 (I think) but I can't bear to re-watch it and compare it.
I make music for film, and I edit video in relation to that work often.
I can recall several years of having to learn how to do things in so many different applications that dictated the end product because the applications were very complex to use, and quite time consuming. I couldn't understand how friends were paid less than application developers (Around 60k annually) to do some of the most impressive VFX things I've observed in commercials and movies, and it was very hard for them to find work even when they had great portfolios.
Fast forward to now, there are mobile apps that can edit videos, and add effects, color grading, etc to videos. I can literally run a video editing session in my car that outputs better product far more quickly than I used to be able to do with $2k software... Even mobile software that can work with object files... Making the process of creation easier will likely be the best field for innovation moving forward. Making things more simple will also save studios and VFX editors tons of money, time and grief.
TikTok formats are dominating the entertainment world right now, VFX movies are beginning to look disingenuous because they either overdo effects, or they cut corners and make things low quality, relying too much on the power of celebrity to push the movie forward... Viewers are also worn out by actors trying to take cues on green screen sets, it comes across often as far too staged, or far too busy visually.
Movies where the VFX trump everything else end up being weak on writing and emotional composition in my opinion. Movies that rely on celebrity become very weak on VFX... I think good movies come from a great script that can be used to plan everything that comes thereafter, and then the quality of the final product depends on the vision of the director and execution of the team involved.
Movies like Blade, Hancock, Ant Man, and even more recent work like "The Boys" are some of my personal favorites because VFX are not the primary hitch to the stories... Avatar completely lost me, even though far more money was spent to make it. VFX is a support tool to great films, when it becomes the primary aspect, the script suffers and budgets balloon, and the worst part is that movies take 5 years to make instead of just taking one.
From what I bore to watch, it's a quite faithful adaptation - even if somewhat simplified.
As someone who only read a bunch of those 80s/90s "transgressive" comic books in the late 2000s-early 2010s, thanks to the wonders of the Web (and never saw any sign of anyone else having heard of these particular works in my godforsaken corner of the world, though Gaiman is somewhat known for his collabs with Pratchett), I could draw comparison with "Preacher" and "The Boys" (based on the eponymous works by Garth Ennis), which seem to be doing the whole "comic book to TV show because we bought off all the counterculture and are consequently running out of interesting intellectual property" thing a bit better. Taking more liberties with the source material, too; adding stuff that wasn't in the book but bears the original spirit.
Interestingly enough, those are also more grittier and less "politically correct" tales - even though their protagonists also tend to espouse enlightened views of radical acceptance, and the underlying message seems to be that the real antagonist is not just some entrenched establishment of crooked power mongers, but the mass of NPCs who enable them. Guess violence is timeless and magical realism is only relevant in the context of specific historical moments of cultural transition - who would've known?
Of course, there's comparatively less of that particular conflict overtly represented in the Sandman - it's one of those metaphysical things where most of the action happens in the characters' inner worlds. (Maybe that's why they thought it was such a timeless tale that recasting some of the characters as non-Gothic would be sufficient modernization?) Still, I consider Gaiman's work part of the same campaign of guerilla cultural warfare that was conducted around the turn of the century by teaching the kids lateral thinking, imagination, and of course emotional literacy and compassion. And of course the kids took that and went to become salaried creatives building nostalgic simulacra to mask the terminal disenchantment of the world (no enchantment -> no hope -> workers don't breed). So, yeah, guess we lost that one.
Finally got around to reading William Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy, and boy oh boy does the man have a good handle on how the media machine acts to transform artworks and the human experiences that art glorifies into a uniform bland "concept soup". Guess they'll start shooting shows from his desiccated corpus next. (Heard it here first, folks!)
All in all a Constantine/Watchmen tier adaptation. Don't waste time watching it, just torrent the original comic books and enjoy.
To chime in about how the article is cherry picking rather than doing deeper analysis: Dark and gritty superhero deconstruction was a product of the '80s and maybe early '90s, and then the '00s had the gritty reboot/reimagining trend for TV shows and movies in general. You also had a lot of prestige drama doing gritty realism with complex, dark antihero male protagonists starting in that era, which kicked into high gear in the '10s. Sopranos to Breaking Bad. Also shows where society was the gritty complex realistic antihero. The Wire to Game of Thrones.
I wouldn't say contemporary culture is any more unhappy than that era, it's just harder to read because there's no GOT type "event" series that everyone is watching right now. Maybe there will be a new cultural phenomenon, or maybe with this glut of streaming content, there won't be. (And if we look at blockbuster films, so many of them are shiny happy Disney-MCU fare, which are definitely not dark and gritty.) It just feels like right now we have a huge array of choices. When presented with that variety, it's really hard to say that it's generally more or less happy.
I do wonder what will replace comic books as the dominant subgenre of pop entertainment. I was hoping we'd get a reconstruction trend with comics like Astro City or Kingdom Come getting adapted, but in writing the previous section, I realized there's no need. For every dark and gritty realistic The Boys, there's multiple Disney+ shows. Batman is a character who's inherently going to have darkness. The majority of superhero comic screen media is escapist and optimistic, and this not-study is cherry-picking.
There are many facets to the discussion of course, but many examples of movies and shows that were exceptional based on lower budgets. When comparing the budget of an entire season of The Boys to almost any single Marvel film though, the wasted money on individual Marvel Films is far more apparent.
Movies like Desperado, Way of the Gun, No Country for Old Men, Fall (by Eric Shaeffer) and many others are far more enjoyable to me than big budget blockbusters, but others may disagree... Those had far lower budgets than many ensemble cast/empty script superhero movies, but preferences are always subjective, so it's not really something I'd really want to argue with anyone about.
According to Wikipedia, The Boys had a budget of $11.2 million per episode in S1. So that's not a great example of a shoestring budget. (Though I agree with your basic point. I'd rather watch The Boys than pretty much any Marvel film.)
Shows like "The Boys" are produced with higher writing and cinematic quality than most of the recent Marvel movies if you ask me... There is always deeply creative stuff out there being made on shoestring budgets. The rewards for those undiscovered creations are dramatically less now because the Internet buries them under algorithms, and far less people are aware of hidden gems within a sea of bad and cheap content.
We can discuss that, but first let me recommend the movie Chronicle (2012) which really is as realistic as I imagine it would get.
Conerecing The Boys, it's not about humanity as much as it's about American stuff. It's being very very specific with its criticism. Homelander is not just a psychopath, he's a product, literally, of American culture (represented by conglomerate Vaught).
Also, while The Boys has criticism and some characters might not survive, it's also very tongue in cheek and tries to entertain rather than lecture. Personally I have fun watching it. If nothing else, it manages to surprise me, which is not something I could say about superhero movies in the last ten years.
This resonates strongly! The predictability and cookie cutter stories of today's superhero movies made them into an unengaging, boring waste of time.
I assume they work for younger viewers but I really can't understand how any adult who respects their own time can enjoy these. There is never anything on stake, there's no danger, there's never a chance for the bad guys to ever win. You know even if some superheroes die, they will either come back or another way to win the day will emerge. So what's the point?
Martin Scorsese expressed a very similar thought(1) for which he had to answer later on. He then explained exactly this: nothing is at risk.
I think that's why shows like The Boys do so well, because besides the bloody visuals they offer the chance that some characters might just not make it, anyone can meet their end at any point.
You can't kill US superheroes because then how will you continue monetizing them? In that regard you can really appreciate the approach they have in the UK where they just end a franchise when they feel they told its story even if it became very popular.
I am just sitting here for an entire decade waiting for great, engaging movies to make a comeback.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-marvel.html
I'm reminded of this HN comment by gwd, specifically:
In superhero comic books and movies, the real superpower is certainty. The good guys always know who the bad guys are; it's just a matter of defeating them. In the real world, we have plenty of power to defeat the bad guys; it's just not always clear who the bad guys are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619006
It seems as if The Boys is playing with that concept and blowing minds.
> But who knows -- I think it's entirely possible to mix contemporary trendy politics without hurting the quality of the actual piece.
I feel like The Boys Season 3 is a stark counterpoint to this opinion. I didn't mind the left leaning stuff in the first 2 seasons because it wasn't so overtly in your face, but season 3 just had to inject it in literally every aspect of the show. I've never literally had a bad taste in my mouth after watching a show, but I promptly cancelled my prime membership with a bad taste in my mouth after watching the first couple episodes of this season.
With properties like The Boys, Bright Burn, and Batman movies and spinoffs like Joker, it's starting to sneak back in.
There was a similar cycle in the late 80s and 90s, when there was a rush of "mature" super hero comics.
To answer some of the comments:
The show with Jason Mamoa was unwatchable, pun intended.
I also watched all the kids content which was either boring or bad. I had high hopes for the Charlie Brown content but my kid who loves space was pretty bored by their show on Snoopy going into Space.
Netflix has can’t-miss comedians like Dave Chappelle and all their specials. They have excellent kids shows like Dragon Prince and a ton of Captain Underpants offerings. HBO Max had new movies coming direct to streaming. Amazon Prime has a bunch of movies for free and it has The Boys. I think their kids shows are decent. Disney+ had all the MCU content including the new shows.
AppleTV+ had none of the above. They may have one-off shows that aren’t horrible but it’s not enough to sustain a subscription. I haven’t heard any buzz about them from my social network because absolutely no one uses AppleTV+. I’m the only one I know that even gave some of the content a shot. I would say that’s a complete failure for a trillion dollar company.
> The boys has had great success but still has orders of mangnitude less cultural impact than the MCU for instance. It's actually making, to some extent, the same point the article is making: super hero movies are bland and childish.
I would think the approach would garner a little more sympathy in a forum populated by a lot people who work for companies that exist solely to divine a specific, incremental slice of human desire, and architect vast amounts of human capital to create an app to fulfill it, and make stupid amounts of money in the process. The people behind the MCU laugh at the notion that they have made a "bland" or "sexless" or <insert pejorative here> product, all the way to bank, with TRAIN LOADS of money.
As others said, I think you're being selective. The article focuses on mainstream action movies.
The boys has had great success but still has orders of mangnitude less cultural impact than the MCU for instance. It's actually making, to some extent, the same point the article is making: super hero movies are bland and childish.
I didn't even know what Orville is, sounds interesting.
I'd say the _slice of current cinematic culture_ selected by the article is broad and impactful, and represents fairly well an important part of the whole. It's not the whole story, and you're right in pointing that out, but I don't agree that that invalidates the article.
agreed, and The Boys has had success exactly because it stands out against the current normal action film/tv
If we can't count The Boys because it's based on an older comic, what do we say about the MCU movies central to the thesis?
Seriously? Selective sampling and click bait.
Two recent programs come to mind and I'm sure this list is not exhaustive. "The boys" and "Orville". Both chock full of "heroes" who in-between being heroes are preoccupied with banging each other, getting drunk, eating or failing themselves. The last episode of "The Boys" ends with Homelander jerking off while perched on a ledge over the city and raging at the unfairness of life. It's certainly a comment on the blandness of the Marvel universe and Orville is a superior and cutting rip off of Star Trek which has become bland and inoffensive in it's latest incarnations. Orville cuts pretty close to the limit for whatever rating it has. The two "gay" aliens and the holodeck porn episode come to mind. It was done fairly well. Stressed out officer on a star ship gets a holodeck porn addiction and is no longer able to relate to or face his life partners demands for attention. It's not heroic and not glorious but relatively human. Orville's officers like to fuck. They order booze from the matter synthesizers and they get depressed and do stupid things. Of course it is still "star trek" and there are always happy endings and everybody learns a lesson at the end. It doesn't drift too far from the genre.
However the article takes a selective slice of current cinematic culture and tries to pretend there are no other options out there whilst at the same time looking back at 80's and 90's cinema as if it was the age of body positive cinema.
"The Boys" is entertaining, but problematic in a number of respects. Somehow CIA are portrayed as opposed to capricious unaccountable extralegal domination of society by powerful cronyist authoritarians? Come again? In scores of nations, including USA, they have taken the opposite side. "The Boys" is more explicit than e.g. "Black Panther" in its CIA whitewashing, although that movie was probably more insulting to the memories of numerous dead Africans.
One salient difference between the characters of Butcher and "King Henry" (this is not specific) is that Henry is a king and Butcher is a somewhat violent homeless dude. One deeply suspects suggestions to see them as somehow the same.
I think Amazon take it less seriously than some of the others. For Netflix, streaming is their entire business. For Disney, HBO and Hulu, it’s the future - they’d probably rather stick with the old school cable TV, movie theatres, etc. model, but they can see the writing on the wall, and they aren’t going to let streaming take them down. But for Amazon ... it’s more just a perk to package with Prime shipping. They want it to be solid, but it’s always going to be very small for them compared to e-commerce, AWS and their platform for 3rd party sellers, fulfilment, etc. Prime Video revenue is similar for them to their co-branded credit cards, I think?
I actually think they have some great content, and a pretty decent app. Their “originals” especially are pretty great - Fleabag, the Boys, the Expanse, all excellent. But yeah, the quality of the app is a bit lower than some of the others, and they have a lot less content than Netflix, because Prime is really not a main focus of their company, more of a nice add-on.
The Boys is pretty good. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190634/
In my opinion the next step is going to be what network TV did. Single episodes available for a week, then available in reruns a year later. You can see the beginnings of this in shows like “The Boys” that have a weekly release cycle.
I don’t know. I really liked the Boys on Amazon Prime. Except they now release one episode at a time. And Disney did the same thing with the Mandalorian. So yeah - I can’t binge watch new series. Watch anytime is more like a DVR feature.
Netflix has other problems. If there’s one or two seasons of a show, you don’t know if the show had a proper ending or if it was just cancelled.
There isn't a single TV show that can't tell a compelling story in 26 hr-long episodes (~2 seasons) Sure, some shows truly shine with time, but if your show is likely to get cancelled, then you should start tying off plot threads for the current arc.
A great example is the Boys. Each season ends with them tying off the main arc, and an expose that sets up for the next season. Season 2's conclusion felt satisfactory, while still keeping me excited for what's to come. The 1st season of Witcher does this really well too.
Netflix's problem is the same one as network TV. It is just far more evident with Netflix because the binge format is central to it. When the entire show is enjoyed in a very small time span, the ending affects your perception of the show more strongly than if the show was enjoyed over years on broadcast TV. A similar phenomenon is visible with movies too, where a bad ending can often come to define the entire movie.
I'm surprised that TV contracts haven't become more sophisticated and diverse with time. How about sign a 3 season contract with no extensions or mandate arc conclusions for shows whose fate is up in the air? Maybe create a final season as a low-budget short, allowing show runners to provide a conclusion when axed.
I'm no expert on the matter, but the complete lack of new ideas in the domain is surprising, given the degree to which Netflix has revolutionized the rest of the distribution business.
That's a good point, but I wonder what's the cost of leaving shows completely unfinished in the long run. I know that I'm very unlikely to start watching a show if I know that it never reaches a satisfying conclusion. This in turn might create some "dead inventory" for Netflix, shows that people are reluctant to start watching because they're unfinished.
Although there's cliffhanger and cliffhanger. Santa Clarita Diet for instance technically ends on a cliffhanger, but it's a last minute event that's supposed to introduce what they thought would be the next season. If you ignore the last scene basically every important plot thread up until that point is either wrapped up or at a status quo, so it's not such a terrible place to end a show.
An other recent example is The Boys: while the show did get renewed for a third season the ending of season 2 could easily be a show final, you'd just have to get rid of the last couple of scenes introducing a cliffhanger for season 3.
Conversely you have shows that clearly couldn't wrap their storyline in a satisfactory way before they were canceled. GLOW is unfortunately in this boat.
I'm starting to get fed up with TV shows (netflix or otherwise) for that same reason. It seems you only have two choices:
- first season doesn't pull enough viewers, it's cancelled.
- first season pulls enough viewers, season 2 onwards take season 1 as a status quo they'll basically never advance from, advancing the story so slowly that it almost feels like a sitcom where most characters end up at the exact point they used to be at the beginning so they can keep getting viewership.
I'm starting to see it with The Boys for example (WARNING slight spoilers next) Season 1 introduced a super dangerous environment where any wrong step could end the characters lives, by the end of season 2 it almost feels like a high school show because the main characters mostly bump into each other without consequences. If they need to kill someone they just introduce a new person a few episodes earlier so they can get rid of that one while the main characters stay healthy.
> but that something is not that obvious to people up on the social ladder.
I think that's a bit of simplification.
The idea that people in charge cannot understand them it's as old as modern humanity (hence 5-6 thousands years old)
I believe that a good part of that "being easily pissed" has been engineered by the same people you think are too up on the social ladder to understand.
What bothers me is that most of those who are genuinely pissed are pissed about things that don't actually matter for them.
What does it matter to the proletarians if a famous person (say an actor) says something pro or against Brexit (for example). You have your vote, you cast it and that's what really matters to your category: representation.
Have you ever read the comments below some of these tweets?
I do not think that kind of reaction is really genuine or has anything to do with the situation of working class in 2020.
I could be wrong, but I think that that kind of knee jerk reaction has been fabricated.
To make an extremely simplified example: in an episode of "the boys" (the TV show) one of the new character says to an old timer who's have more followers than her (the incumbent in the posted article) something on the line of "you have followers, I have soldiers"
People up on the social ladder are up there also because they are good at exploiting human weaknesses and aren't afraid nor ashamed of doing it for their own personal gain.
The following is just for desktop browsers, since I haven't tried their app:
- they split their shows by season to make their catalogue look bigger, but it's more confusing for the user
- don't make it explicit on the thumbnail either, so you have to hover over it to know what season of the show we're talking about
- although they do a decent job at continuing to watch episodes in a season, they're not making it clear when you've already watched entire seasons and those remain on the screen and are recommended to you over and over again
- advertise a trailer as an entire new season (see: The Boys season 2), leading to pretty gigantic disappointment (vs the netflix experience where a red notification for something you like is actually a great surprise because you KNOW it's an actual release)
- have a lower chance of being able to reload a page of something you left mid-watch and the page successfully reloading to the right content and timestamp
- the overflow of their preview hides the show underneath the current one which means any directly vertical scrolling is infuriating because you will trigger the overflow of the show underneath (that you see 20% of) only after having gone vertically down beyond 80% of the div in question
- the line = product line thing is confusing, as everything starts with "prime" for a full screen, (so why the repetition? oh, it's because ->) suddenly you get news (I don't care about them) and movies to rent or buy (I also don't care about paying prime to pay on top of it)
These days where everyone is emotionally high. Deliberately avoiding anything that reflects today's state of affairs: 1. Amazon: The Boys, The Feed, Upload, Catastrophe, The Widow, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, The Newsroom, Homecoming 2. NBC: Zoey's Playlist <--GREAT to unwind emotionally. 3. CDW: The 100 4. ABC: The 4400 5. Netflix: Mars (only 1 season, 2nd season looks and feels like current gov state of affairs whereby the 1st season was more Mars adventure)
So much crap going on, just trying to avoid anything that reflects today's idiot run gov/policy makers. But admittedly, slowly finding it hard to avoid since every show plot always seems to come full circle to why things gets F*d up in the first place. Netflix' Mars is a perfect example where 2nd season they brought in more gov/policy/corp injustice and made it unwatchable.
If you really need to get away...mentally, found Zoey's Playlist quite touching... like sobbed in every episode it was so emotionally releasing. I was forced watch bc my wife won the night's remote control.
Bottomline: repeating what I've said above, just avoid anything that has gov/policy/corruption/corp.
Beside the HBO adaptation of Watchmen, I'm also watching the Amazon adaptation of The Boys right now. It addresses the übermensch-worship-culture even more directly. Highly recommended (though not as highly as Watchmen).
There's no timelier follow up to Alan Moore's stance on superhero culture than Damon Lindelof's Watchmen which is currently in the middle of its first (and likely only) season run on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/watchmen
It's not only a high-flying feat of television writing, acting, and directing. It's something Moore will likely never endorse or even see (he's apparently denounced any adaptation/continuation of his work) and yet embodies the spirit of Watchmen better than anything I've ever seen in the genre.
Lindelof and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin records an hourlong podcast (https://www.hbo.com/watchmen/watchmen-listen-to-official-podcast) for HBO talking about the genesis of show, its relationship with the Zach Snyder movie (respect for the form, detachment from the execution and alterations), and the very subject of this BBC piece: people who wear masks to enact vigilante justice are and should be concerning.
The parallels between 1985 and 2019 malaise, worldwide unrest, and that awful feeling that something's not quite right with the way the world is running are incredible well capture by the show.
Whether you've read the graphic novel or not, I can't recommend watching HBO's Watchmen enough. Even if you dismiss it as an unworthy heir to Moore and Gibbon's work, you will without a doubt be blown away by the show and how impeccably crafted it is.
For detail-hungry folks, the show's writing staff is release ancillary material that expands on the world (re)building within the show at https://www.hbo.com/peteypedia. Obviously don't read this before you watch each specific episode.
PS: I found the premise of the Amazon's The Boys interesting but beyond some impressive sequences and shocking twists, the show's writing is a bit too cynically shallow for its own good. There's not much commentary beyond the rottenness of (almost) every character in the show and that ends up feeling a little too much of one-note throughout the whole season.
I enjoyed The Boys too. That being said, part of why I watch super movies/shows is to enjoy the escape, to see people being ... more. I can see people being assholes anywhere, so a story that focuses around that needs to be significantly better than one that doesn't for me to enjoy it.