Last week, a raft of intelligent, watchable, enjoyable shows were nominated for the Emmy Award for outstanding drama series, the TV version of the best picture Oscar. Each of these prestige TV shows made tart references to our current moment. “The Pitt” dealt with ICE in the E.R. “Slow Horses” and “The Diplomat” dramatized the dangers of cynical political expedience. “The Gilded Age” and “Paradise” produced two very different takes on oligarch-itecture. “Your Friends & Neighbors” wallowed in larcenous suburban finance dads in midlife crisis, while “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” jousted with how to transcend one’s “low birth.” The only show to truly depart from dramatic realism was “Pluribus,” a sci-fi show about a space virus that made virtually all humans highly agreeable zombies, making you wonder if this is what life will be like living in a world ruled by A.I. agents.
But in the end, none of them actually tried to capture the grand farce of a moment we’re in. They didn’t even come close. Each of them is too polite, too nuanced, too, in the end, moderate — centrist, even.
I expect more from my high-end pop culture than this.
Centrism, in all its norm-respecting, common-ground-finding glory, is having a rough go of it lately. Our president does what he wants, where and when and to whomever he wants, and the cowed and craven set of politicians who make up his flock just go along for the ride. It seems more and more as if we’re living in a burn-it-all-down age of greed, mayhem and corruption.
You might never know this from watching prestige TV.
There was one show, however, that hit this head-on — and it’s not “Industry,” HBO’s finance-and-cocaine drama that was also snubbed by the Emmys this year. It’s Amazon Prime’s “The Boys.” The superhero spoof, which ended its five-season run this May, received not a single Emmy nomination in a major award category. Despite the fact that it dared to land savage, serious and entertaining punches about everything warped in American culture — corporate greed, celebrity worship, moral hypocrisy and how they all fit together.
It did get nominated for best dramatic series once, for its second season, in 2020. It didn’t win, and hasn’t been nominated since. What are the Emmy voters afraid of?
For those unfamiliar, “The Boys” is set in an alt-present-day United States, where superheroes (“supes”) are real and abundant. But instead of renegades valiantly saving the world from doomsday plots, they’re more like substance-abusing superinfluencers: entitled, narcissistic pursuers of fame whose high-profile “saves” are frequently stage-managed photo ops. They often offhandedly end up killing bystanders. The supes — especially the elite supe group known as “The Seven,” a parody of DC’s Justice League — are controlled, weaponized and monetized by the company that came up with the chemical to create them: Vought International, a corporate octopus whose business interests range from Disney-style entertainment to pharmaceuticals to military contracts.
The gullible public laps up all the supe mythology — especially that of Homelander, the all-American, charismatic leader of the Seven whose authoritarian megalomania drives him to take over the Oval Office, having naysayers locked up in detention camps (or just laser-visioning them in half) along the way.
The show premiered in 2019. Critics and audiences loved it. In 2020, it became the first TV series outside Netflix to crack Nielsen’s weekly top 10 list of most-watched movies and series — the same year it earned that Emmy nomination. (A central story line that season was about Vought’s Nazi-era origins, which probably gave it gravitas.) In 2024, it hit No. 1.
Maybe as time went on, it started to feel, from an Emmys perspective, just too extra. It’s certainly over the top. There’s blood, gore and profanity galore. There’s even an evil X-rated Russian supe named Love Sausage who is featured in an episode titled “Herogasm.”
But is tastefulness where TV should draw the line — when reality threw that line in the shredder a while ago? Shouldn’t we be open to letting something else take a whack at it? This vulgar world of corporate-branded superheroes isn’t just an ironic conceit; it’s a brilliant, subversive lampooning of our politically divided, social-media-addicted, celebrity-hypnotized society — and, in the words of the “Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, of the “powerful and selfish people using social media to intentionally tear people apart for their own selfish interests.”
It may not be subtle. But neither is the era we live in. The Shakespearean scramble of “House of Cards” or “Succession” (both repeat Emmy winners for outstanding drama series) seems quaint by comparison with what we get on newsfeeds every day.
It’s also why the crudely framed, precisely targeted assaults of “South Park” can still feel empowering, and why New York Times readers recently voted “Idiocracy” (2006) the film that most captures America. Real violence isn’t a good choice for anyone. But imagined violence, delivered with brutal blasts of satire, can provide a blessed sense of retribution, empowerment and relief in a moment when those feelings are in short supply.
Amid all the mayhem, there is another lesson the show teaches.
You might wonder why a show that focuses on the superheroes isn’t called “The Supes,” but that’s really the point here. The characters putting the plot into action aren’t the supes, but “the boys,” the four men, and eventually two women, who commit themselves to destroying the company and the supes who are making their world a living hell. Even if some have superpowers, they don’t know what they’re doing. They take insane chances. They fail over and over and keep getting outsmarted by Vought — until they don’t. The show’s real heroes, working outside the official system, pursue their impossible task no matter how the deck is stacked against them. And that is how they win.
Source photograph by Amazon Studios.
David Colman has been contributing to The New York Times since 1996.
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