The Boys Review

Antony Starr is the reason to watch and very nearly the only reason. Homelander is played as a man with unlimited power and no interior life, terrified of a crowd's disapproval, and Starr keeps finding new registers for that panic long after the writing stops giving him new situations. The first two seasons work because the satire is aimed carefully, at brand management, at the way an atrocity becomes a press strategy, at the specific horror of a workplace where the boss can kill you.

Then it stalls. Season three sets up a confrontation and defers it, season four defers it again, and the show develops a habit of substituting escalation for consequence, which is why the audience numbers have drifted so far below the critical ones. Karl Urban does a great deal with a character written as one note, and Erin Moriarty is stranded in a subplot that resets every year. The gore is inventive and the satire is loud. Neither is a substitute for a story that goes somewhere.