The Boys returns to Amazon Prime Video on September 4.
By Chris Flanagan
While 2020 has been an overall difficult and strange year, television programming has resembled a fairly normal release schedule up until now. Personally, as each month has slogged forth my need for escapism has exponentially increased. So when The Boys announced its triumphant return in September, my heart rejoiced.
For the uninitiated, The Boys centers around a world of superheroes that are driven by corporate sponsorships, movie deals, merchandising and public relations events. At the heart of this is a Justice League send-up called, The Seven, consisting of the most popular (and marketable) superheroes who appear wholesome and caring on the surface but are actually comprised of rapists, murderers, and selfish beings. Because of this, there is a group known as The Boys who are tasked with keeping The Seven and other superheroes publicly honest while also answering for their crimes.
The largest fear that exists when a show with such a successful premiere season returns is if it can live up to the hype but fans of The Boys can rest assured that season two is the perfect complement and follow-up in every way. Season two manages to include all the things we’ve come to know and love from the story – murder, betrayal, corporate overlords, greed – it’s all here! These are the ingredients of a show that seems eerily truthful when it comes to wondering what the actual world would be like if superheroes existed. Season two picks up right where the first season left off as Hughie, Frenchie, Kimiko, and Mother’s Milk are in hiding after being pegged as the villains who murdered one of The Seven. Together, they are still attempting to bring down Vought International, the company that sponsors The Seven and who is behind all of their creation and success. Jack Quaid is experiencing a high with Lower Decks on CBS All Access, and several streaming movies that are quality while Karl Urban as the iconic Billy Butcher continues to prove with his performance that this is the role he was born to play, aside from Dredd. Don’t @ me.
With only eight episodes in season two, The Boys wastes no time with its story as it simultaneously balances multiple plotlines from The Seven and The Boys as well as incredible sub-plots from The Deep, an Aquaman parody, Butcher and the newest addition to The Seven, Stormfront who quickly challenges Homelander’s position as the unspoken leader of The Seven. But even in the show’s ability to avoid bloated episodes, at an hour-long runtime for each, there still manages to be several episodes towards the season’s second act that could’ve been slightly more condensed. This is my one and only knock on season two and will more than likely be remedied by Amazon’s weekly release schedule of the show rather than all at once.
The Boys successfully continues its momentum of a strong first season with an even more heightened and powerful second season that introduces new characters that constantly keep viewers guessing, expanded action pieces that will leave many in awe of just how far they choose to push the limit and explore character development that offers a satisfying conclusion to some storylines while allowing potentially new ones to come forward for season three which has already been greenlit. Overall, The Boys is everything previous fans would have hoped for in a second season while newcomers will be intrigued to start from the beginning and will be rewarded with a truly incredible conclusion.
I give The Boys Season 2 an A+.
TV and City 