The Boys doesn’t make a flawless transition to television, but damn is it unexpectedly good.
I mean, Karl Urban’s attempt at Billy Butcher’s accent is occasionally awful, much of the degrading sex and sexual violence from the source material has been toned down or inverted, the limited budget means there are no insane, large-scale fight scenes, and virtually all of the most disgustingly funny stuff has been left out for the sake of delicate stomachs and sensibilities.
But what’s left still works, and works well.
As you’d expect with a #metoo-era version of The Boys, the female characters have all been expanded, but unlike something like American Gods, that expansion pays off. Gender-swapping Stilwell and casting Elisabeth Shue was a great move; the character becomes a slightly more nuanced corporate scumbag. Erin Moriarty does well with an iteration of Annie Jupiter that isn’t an impotent victim, and while I miss the decadence and disinterest of the original Queen Maeve, Dominique McElligott’s more subtle depiction gives the character room to develop.
And Chace Crawford as The Deep is a surprise. First, because Gossip Girl never gave me any indication he had the comedic chops for such a role. Second, because the writers found a clever way to take a woman’s predictable Traumatic Descent Into Self-Loathing and transfer it to a shitty man who actually has it coming.
But holy shit, the real coup here is Antony Starr’s Homelander. With a host of subtle facial expressions and line readings, Starr paints a portrait of an omnipotent egomaniac who is completely fixated on every slight he’s ever endured, great and small. Forget the banality of evil… this is the pettiness of a god.
Is it for you, though? Well, that depends. How do you feel about a man using a newborn baby to murder a room full of armed assailants, or an ersatz Aquaman comforting a captive dolphin with promises to lovingly fuck it later?