“The Boys” is not coy about its parallels with current politics and former President Donald J. Trump in particular. The new season opens the night of a presidential election, the plot building toward the certification of electors on Jan. 6. Homelander is on trial (for murdering an anti-supe protester) and running ads for a legal-defense fund that asks for help against “his toughest opponent yet: Our corrupt legal system.” His followers accuse his critics of pedophilia. His trial draws demonstrations that turn violent, and he tells his unruly supporters, “You are all very special people.” He could laser-vision someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any support.
After 9/11, series like “24” and “Homeland” grappled with the threat of terrorism and the morality of the response to it. (“The Boys,” indeed, originated as a comics series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson that sent up Bush-era War on Terror jingoism; its TV developer and showrunner, Eric Kripke, has refit its themes for the era of the alt-right.) Today, with illiberal authoritarians rising worldwide and drawing praise from American politicians and media figures, the threat to democracy is just as timely a subject.
But the shriveling of democracy is harder to dramatize for TV than a ticking bomb. The term “fascism” itself is not just loaded but nebulous. Umberto Eco called it “a beehive of contradictions”; the historian Ian Kershaw has said that defining it is like “trying to nail jelly to the wall.” Those who have tried anyway tend to describe less a set of policies than a mode of action, even an aesthetic, that prizes nationalism, strongmen (and often a cult of virility) and the glorification of violence.
This may be what makes a superhero satire a fitting genre to capture it. “The Boys” isn’t a treatise; it’s a vibe. It communicates on an instinctive, blood-and-guts level, not through “West Wing”-like dialogues on policy. It is foremost a raunchy and gleefully gross entertainment, leaning into splatter and dark comedy, supe orgies and octopus sex. (The Deep, an amphibious member of the Seven played by Chace Crawford, has a more complex relationship with marine life than Aquaman.) The series does not attempt a textbook definition of fascism; it just plunges its fist through your chest and trusts you’ll get the point.
Fascism in America, if it ever came, might not fly in wearing a cape. But it might well trade on American images of virility, of superiority, of bigness, of winning. It would have a style, and that style might well be kitschy, loud and as unmissable as the logo on a superhero’s chest.
Fascists have long been entwined with superheroes, providing a reliable source of villains for patriotic stories since Captain America decked Hitler. The Marvel universe more recently used the Nazi-like Hydra organization as a multiheaded big bad.