I Watched The Boys

A perfect first season that slowly forgot what made it special

August 21st, 2026

Season 1 of The Boys is great. The showrunners had a clear and well-executed vision - a dark satire of superheroes, fame, and shady corporate shenanigans - and it came out at exactly the right time, just past the peak of Marvelmania. It felt grounded, real, and personal. The characters and their motivations were the whole point, and I genuinely started to care about them.

Then it fell into the same trap that so many other series do. The first chapter is restrained and grounded, but then the writers start explaining too much and upping the spectacle without actually raising the stakes. Whatever made the original feel special gets spread too thin. With The Boys, the shift is gradual but hard to miss - after Season 1, the plot starts driving the show more than the characters do, and it leans harder and harder into shock value and gross-out moments as the writing declines.

Antony Starr and Karl Urban are the backbone of the show, and their characters stay mostly compelling throughout. The Deep also stands out as an amusing heel, but his character suffers the most from Flanderization by the end. Seasons 2 and 3 are generally entertaining, funny, and dark in the right ways, but they never quite reach the highs of the first season. Then there's the ending of Season 3, which felt like a cop-out at the time and left me wondering if the show was originally supposed to end there - and that's where things really start to go south.

Most of Season 4 could probably be skipped. The finale is one of its best episodes, but then Season 5 opens by largely undoing what it had set up. The last two seasons lean harder and harder into the shock and gross-out material, which worked as seasoning in Season 1 but eventually becomes the whole meal... yuck. What started as sharp satire slowly starts to feel like the thing it was making fun of: a bloated franchise that refuses to end.

Season 5 is better than Season 4, but it has the same core problem. A lot is happening and nothing is happening at the same time. Character development feels repetitive or unearned. Plot threads spin around without really going anywhere. By the end, the Boys are essentially in the same position they were in at the end of Season 1, with almost no major characters actually dead. For a show built around tension and consequence, that's a pretty fundamental storytelling problem. Part of what creates high stakes is knowing that anyone could die at any moment, so when characters keep surviving impossible odds, that tension eventually disappears. It's the same reason long-running Marvel and DC stories tend to lose me - nothing and no one ever feels like they're really in danger, so what's the point? A show like this needed to be much more willing to be brutal with its cast, and it just wasn't.

The few deaths near the end didn't really land for me either. Some felt long overdue and conveniently timed to satisfy the plot rather than earned by anything the characters had actually done or failed to do. Several are quickly undercut by unfunny jokes, which only makes whatever impact they were supposed to have feel even weaker. The series finale itself felt rushed, like the writers had a checklist of things left to resolve and just ran through them as quickly as possible. It's especially strange for a show that spent two seasons spinning its wheels.

One genuine highlight from Season 5, however, was the Seth Rogen scene. It was somewhat nostalgic and made me want another comedy movie from that group more than another season of this show. If Season 5 had leaned harder into that energy, it might have at least been more memorable.

The production values, special effects, acting, and casting were all surprisingly strong across all five seasons - credit where it's due. And I never actually hated the show. It just didn't really end so much as stop.

In short: Season 1 is essential, Seasons 2 and 3 are worth it if you're already hooked, and Seasons 4 and 5 can probably be skipped unless you're deeply invested. Even then, go in with very low expectations.