78 newyork| september14–27, 2020
mic precision to complement its aesthetic
maximalism.
The other thing I can’t help but be dis-
tracted by is something The Boys can’t really
avoid: The show is at its best when it’s a cri-
tique of overwhelming corporate power,
and it’s paid for by one of the biggest, most
powerful corporations on the planet. Every
promotion for The Boys is also a promotion
for Amazon Prime, and its success is a win
for Jeff Bezos, a guy so wealthy and powerful
he almost writes himself as its ideal villain.
Like it or not, though, there are only a
few places where a show like The Boys can
get made, only a few companies funding
TV production with the money necessary
for a series of this scope to exist. So maybe
there’s something underhanded and sub-
versive about The Boys’ streaming home,
as if a cultural bomb had been smuggled
into the very heart of Amazon’s inescap-
able brand. But I also couldn’t stop think-
ing about Stormfront, the new season-two
character who becomes popular bypublicly
voicing criticism of Vought. Ultimately, she’s
its property; her popularity only shores up
Vought’s foothold in the market of audience
appeal. So while I like The Boys, and the ele-
ments that ring truest for me are those that
speak to corporate greed and exclusionary
visions of power, I also can’t help but won-
der if Bezos watches the show andwhat he
thinks about it. ■superhero girlfriend, then this isnotand
will never be your show. For everyonewill-
ing to jump onboard with that mentality,
though, The Boys has one of the mostbrac-
ing, uncomfortable, and piercingpointsof
view currently on TV.
By now, there’s a hearty traditionofgritty
superhero stories. I wrote in my review
of The Boys’ first season that theconcept
of dark and twisty superheroesitselfhas
become rote enough to have totallylost its
luster. It’s no longer exciting topointout
that superheroes are probably bad;Watch-
men broke that ground decadesago.But
The Boys—both the original comicand
especially the TV adaptation—isthemost
interesting and trenchant update oftheidea
that I’ve seen, and the show ups theanteon
all of its most suggestive ideas in seasontwo.
It’s most centrally and effectivelya show
about superheroes, capitalism,andcon-
sumer culture. Homelander (AntonyStarr),
the Captain America knockoff andleaderof
the show’s Avengers-style superheroteam,
the Seven, is the character mostinvested
in maintaining a shiny superheropublic
identity and is also among the series’big-
gest, scariest sociopaths. Season twointro-
duces a new member of the Seven,Storm-
front (Aya Cash), who swiftly undermines
Homelander’s popularity, deliveringwhat
feels like authentic humanity in theheroes’
stilted press appearances. For anyonewell
versed in the darker online message boards,
however, the slow reveal about Stormfront’s
true motives will come as little surprise.(On
this show, “most sociopathic” is atitlewith
a lot of competition.)
The difference with The Boys is that while
the heroes fight one another withfamil-
iar superpowers, they are all evenmore
obsessed with soft power: Who hasthebet-
ter brand? How is this unexpectedlytough
interview with Maria Menounosgoing?
When the Deep (Chace Crawford)joinsa
Scientology-esque church and startsreha-
bilitating his image, it’s not throughimpres-
sive feats of world-saving derring-do;it’s
through a vulnerable sit-down interview
with Katie Couric. The show is smartabout
media and the all-powerful impact of a Q
Score, and it’s even better at thinking about
how the soft and hard powers wielded by
these characters combine into a truly com-
bustible, terrifying cultural hegemony.
In fact, The Boys is so good at the specifi-
cally horrible contours of its awful superhe-
roes and their corporate overlords, Vought
International, that its storytelling about the
Boys themselves is a bit of a letdown. Don’t
ge t me wrong: Billy Butcher (KarlUrban)
and Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) are
completely effective as the sort-ofleaders
of a ragtag bunch of nobodies who’ve made
it their mission to uncover the gross truthsabout Vought. But you get the sense that
the show’s most baroque bits of nightmare
fuel, both physical and mental, are reserved
for the Supes. The Boys do their best to pull
off the usual desperate plots to find world-
shattering information that will change
everyone’s minds about heroes forever, but
it feels as if they’re there mostly to help us
register how fucked up everything is. Did I
mention the exploding heads? It’s all pretty
fucked up.
Guts and a defiant lack of glory aren’t
usually my bag, but The Boys does them
with such gusto that I didn’t mind them that
much. If it were purposeless blood splatter,
it’d be easier to just turn it off, but the vio-
lence is tied to such a convincing critique of
media image-making and corporate control
that I was willing to endure the carnage.
Only two things can pull me out of The
Boys and distract me from its otherwise
compelling worldview. One is absolutely
within the show’s power to change: the
episode run times. There’s no need for
multiple episodes that clock in at 67 min-
utes. Not only is this an endurance test for
viewers, it unquestionably undermines the
show’s effectiveness. With some punchier
plot beats, some more deliberately cho-
sen “Here’s why I’m sad” heart-to-heart
moments, and a willingness to sacrifice
one level of plot twist for the sake of overall
tightness, The Boys could achieve a rhyth-THEATER ON TV/ HELEN SHAW
Coastal Elites IsAs Distanced As Its SubjectsAdapting the smuggestaspect of New York theaterforthesmallscreen.one of the hundred reasons this short, horrifying coro-
navirus moment has felt so long culturally is that its artistic ques-
tions don’t seem to change or advance. What makes something “filmed
theater” as opposed to “digital performance”? Should we call any perfor-
mance on a screen “television”? We go around and around, wondering if
definitions even matter. I spend hours thinking about categorization, but
I know fussing about genre is how critics have always entertained them-
selves. We have to argue about something.
At least HBO’s foray into quarantine creation, Coastal Elites, offers the
swift gift of clarity. This show is obviously theater,
regardless of the delivery system. Originally conceived
by the playwright Paul Rudnick as a groupofcomic
political monologues, it was on track to appearat the
Public Theater this year. Rewritten during covid-19,
it was ported over to HBO, and the “special presenta-
tion” was shot remotely.