4 out of 5

Developed by: Craig Rosenberg, Evan Goldberg, and Eric Kripke

covers season 1

The Boys was a show I never really looked forward to, but also found myself well entertained – and often impressed – by each episode. That is: I didn’t walk away thirsting for what was next, but once I hit play,I never felt like my time was wasted. In keeping with the source material’s edgelord nonsense, the show had (for worse, I’d say) a bar to meet in terms of graphicness and conceptual shock; at the same time, I can / do acknowledge that this over-the-top stuff is kind of “required” for the series to make its point, and the TV show was able to settle on a more enjoyably schlocky version of its gross-outs for the most part, though in all of this, there’s always a question / problem of how much of this do we need to explore to actually make that point, especially when it might not ultimately be too deep.

Gen V focuses on a school that, essentially, functions as a training ground for “The Seven,” the celebrity superhero team of The Boys world, and the one that show explored from the POV of those taking note of their extreme corruption – that these heroes were often just super-powered media puppets, with all of their bad behaviors covered up in favor of keeping a publicity money machine going. Here, we’re somewhat flip-flopped: we’re seeing this all from the eyes of the students, those with the powers, and particularly new student Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), who approaches this world with an untrusting chip on her shoulder.

Which seems initially justified by her interactions with her snippy and shallow classmates, and starts to set Gen V up as kind of a predictable Boys parallel, as students vie for top positions at the school and exhibit plenty of Seven-adjacent behaviors along the way, making it seem like we’re going to just be repeating that show, except with the unfortunate liberties of young adult hormones and impulses fueling things to even more absurd heights.

But: even within the first episode, developers Craig Rosenberg, Evan Goldberg, and Eric Kripke and their writers start to pivot, by actually seeing these students – yes, even the popular ones – as, for lack of a better word, human. Through Marie, we get the tragic backstories often missing from The Seven’s parodies, giving her a drive that keeps her tasked with being a hero for her estranged sister; some inadvertent popularity allows her to get to know some inner circle students – top spot holder Luke (Patrick Schwarzenegger); the Magneto-esque Andre (Chance Perdomo); the varyingly powered, gender-swapping Jordan (London Thor and Derek Luh); telekinetic Cate (Maddie Phillips) – and also her outsider roommate, Emma (Lizze Broadway). As with my frequent appreciation for The Boys’ writing, I was constantly surprised by how carefully, and relatively realistically, Gen V wrote for these characters, using the obvious but smart proxy of their powers and the fight for a spot in The Seven to cover the evergreen social struggles of teens, but also the very modern way that interacts with social media.

We still quite often dip into visual and topical overkill, with some side stories that are there just to cover “very special episode” type things, which are not unimportant but can be questionably padding in a show that’s not really episodic, and, again, some gross stuff that can at least be said to be “fitting” in a college environment, but still sometimes begs whether or not “because we can” is enough of a reason to show something on screen. And to be clear, it’s not just because this stuff is bloody or kinky, moreso because we’ve established the overblown nature of the situation, and anything beyond that should contribute to the story in some way… but then occasionally you can tell the creative team just had some concept they thought would be funny or shocking and tossed it up there.

Anyhow.

The exploration of these powered teens as human is not shortcutted: they’re all still quite untrusting of one another, but certain escalations at the school lead to the discovery that the faculty might be up to something, and Marie and the others become headbutting bedfellows while they juggle that top-spot hustle with a growing desire to find out what that “something” is: the battle between maintaining your social standing, living your life, and maybe also wanting to do something worthwhile with it. Gen V thus becomes a proper antithesis to The Boys: showing that supes didn’t necessarily start out the way they’re shown, but had to grow into it, “trained” by society. This is a much more nuanced discussion than The Boys version, which got stuck on political parables and couldn’t much advance its intrigue beyond the revelation that heroes were bad. But that’s not meant to undersell how well that show has preceded – it has become a smarter show during its subsequent seasons – and also makes sense why Gen V is sort of being considered a followup season to The Boys, and not strictly a spin-off.

So, yes, you’ll cringe in much the same way you might’ve during The Boys’ excesses, but don’t let Gen V’s teen-centric cast and focus fool you: body fluid flinging and gore flashiness aside, this is the more mature show, gathering up all of the potential of its concept and expanding upon it in thought-provoking ways – ways that poke at the modern discourse with obviousness but care, not always as black and white as its predecessor – but also in ways that are actually thematically tied to its story, making the buildup of its conflicts quite grabbing.

Okay, maybe I was looking forward to watching the next episodes of Gen V.