It’s rare for a show that appears to be running out of ideas to return two years later with the creative force that courses through the fourth season of Prime Video’s “The Boys.” After a couple of seasons of arguable wheel-spinning, seasons that seemed desperate to top the shock value of the first but didn’t do much with the complex themes or dense potential world-building in its abundance of ideas, “The Boys” oozes creative confidence with this outing and sets the table in a manner that bodes well for the future of this massive streaming hit. Forget running out of ideas; “The Boys” might just be getting started.
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The fourth season of “The Boys” starts relatively close to the end of the third outing. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Singer (Jim Beaver) is about to be President, but it’s his Veep, Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), that’s the concern as she’s a secret Supe, someone who can make heads go boom “Scanners” style. A Vought-friendly superhero in the White House could be a disaster for not just The Boys but all mankind, and so stopping Neuman, possibly with the involvement of a superhero-killing virus, becomes the main thrust of season four as the action moves towards a January 6th Presidential confirmation—yes, that date is not accidental.
The political unrest (and consistently R-rated humor) of the fourth season is just a backdrop for increasingly complex character work across multiple subplots. Last season ended with Homelander (Antony Starr) literally murdering a man at a rally, discovering this year that the act of public homicide barely dents his public image as a hero—in fact, some of his fan base even digs it. An unchallenged Homelander leads to a more introspective Homelander as he tries to figure out not just how he got here but who he can trust when he’s surrounded by terrified yes men. The quest for the latter brings Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) into his sphere, a new member of The Seven whose intelligence is her superpower, allowing her to essentially become Homelander’s Chief of Staff. She’s almost the Karl Rove of the show’s antihero, someone who knows how to maximize the vitriol and hate in the world in a way that benefits Homelander and The Seven.
As Homelander wonders what matters to him this season, he tries harder to hold onto his son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), playing tug-of-war with the kid with Butcher (Karl Urban), who worries about what happens if Homelander warps Ryan’s superpowers for evil. The problem is that Butcher may not have much time to save Ryan as his use of V last season has given him a terminal disease, adding a sense of urgency to this season that’s been lacking. With possibly months left to live, Butcher has to stop Neuman, save Ryan, and quit hallucinating. Diminishing Butcher both as a team leader and even in terms of his mental and physical health gives the fourth season of “The Boys” a very different energy, allowing Urban to find different beats for a character that was getting a little stale.
Similarly, it felt like the writers didn’t really know what to do with Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Starlight (Erin Moriarty) last season, but they get some of their richest arcs in the back half of this fourth outing. Hughie is reunited with his mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) when his father (Simon Pegg) ends up in the hospital, clinging to life. And Starlight gets a new nemesis in the form of the other newest member of The Seven, a truly obnoxious hero named Firecracker (Valorie Curry), who takes direct aim at Starlight and her supporters. The Hughie and Annie arcs are part of an overall theme of the season about the impact of trauma, even in a world of superpowers. That theme is also reflected in a relationship with Frenchie (Tomer Capone), someone whose life he changed forever, and even more revelations about Kimiko’s (Karen Fukuhara) dark origin story. So many people on this show have skeletons in their closets, and some of those skeletons have superpowers.
The fourth season of “The Boys” is also about how corruption and evil benefit from chaos. Themes like manufactured outrage and evangelical aggression that are clearly meant to mirror the state of the actual country in the 2020s feel smartly considered instead of just window dressing for potential viral clips. “The Boys” is constantly working like a funhouse mirror of the real world this season, even bringing in issues like potential coups, the use of the 25th amendment, bodily autonomy, and phrases that have become toxic in political discourse. Where some of this material seemed shallow in past seasons, it’s richer here because it’s not didactic as much as it is clever. Look at the world around us in 2024 and imagine how this chaos would be even more uncontrollable and the world even more divided if there happened to be people with superpowers in it.
If there’s a weakness in the fourth season, it’s that the show once again feels a bit too crowded for eight hours of television. Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) gets little to do, A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) covers some of the same ground, and The Deep (Chace Crawford) is a character who seems to have run out of creative gas a couple of years ago. There are so many characters in “The Boys” that it can be hard for the writers to keep them all equally engaging, but they do a better job in this department than the last couple of years, especially in how they let Starr and Urban give up more of the spotlight than usual. It still feels crowded at times, but the balance is better than in the last two seasons because the plotting feels tighter, making the shallower supporting characters understandable casualties of the improved focus.
“The Boys” started with an undeniably engaging concept in its examination of sociopathic superheroes but seemed to lean on both Homelander’s immense popularity and its willingness to remind people of its very adult sense of humor instead of being consistently creative. It felt like a show that was running out of ideas by the end of year three. One of the greatest TV surprises of 2024 is that the opposite is true. “The Boys” may finally be growing up. [B+]
“The Boys” premieres on Prime Video on June 13.