'All my life, these powers have only brought me grief, along with an unnecessary self-harm advisory warning.' Photos: Handout
The adult world is complicated, a grown-up in Netflix's rather fun anime Gamera: Rebirth tells the show's young protagonists. Given what they went through just before that, it doesn't come off condescending at all.
But that's a whole universe and medium away from The Boys, Prime Video's acclaimed live-action adaptation of the Garth Ennis-Darick Robertson comics.
It's kind of undeniable that the adult world of this setting is pretty fubar (hey, do I look like Google to you?). Given what we've seen in three seasons to date, that doesn't come off as exaggerated at all.
Let's shift the spotlight a generation forward, then, in this very same Vought International-run, corporate-beholden world.
Gen V takes a look at the shenanigans that college-age supes get up to, and guess what? It's just about as messed up as the grown-ups' hijinks.
Developed by The Boys veterans Craig Rosenberg and Eric Kripke with their colleague Seth Rogen's buddy Evan Goldberg, Gen V trots out all the expected college drama/comedy tropes of awkwardness, peer pressure, raging hormones and substance abuse, and drenches them in liberal amounts of gore (among other fluids).
'I'm so tempted to say Flame On!, but I think they'll write me out of the show immediately if I did. Oh wait ...'
With a laundry list of The Boys alumni on the executive producer list, it's not surprising that Gen V showrunners Michelle Fazekas and Tara Butters – behind earlier PG-rated fare like Reaper, Agent Carter and Emergence – have gleefully embraced the hard "R" rating here.
The show is based on a story arc from The Boys and is set in the unusually named Godolkin University (clearly, just so it can be shortened to the hubristic "God U"), which has produced the very "best" supes over the years.
Run by the calculative Dean Shetty (Shelley Conn, Bridgerton) and with the charismatic Richard "Rich Brink" Brinkerhoff (Clancy Brown) as head of its Crimefighting Department, God U is THE place for aspiring supes to go.
Among them, for the purposes of our study: Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair, The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina), a blood manipulator with a tragic past; Emma Meyer/Little Cricket (Lizzie Broadway), a size-changer who triggers her power in icky ways; Andre Anderson (Chance Perdomo, another face from Sabrina), a... let's say, junior Magneto; and Jordan Li (London Thor/Derek Luh), a gender-shifter with invulnerability and energy powers.
Far from friends at the start, they are forced together by dormitory assignment and circumstance when a varsity-mate goes berserk and commits murder on campus.
Suddenly, outcast Marie finds herself among the popular kids; Emma struggles to keep up with her roomie's newfound fame and her own "mission"; Andre takes it upon himself (with a lot of help from his friends) to investigate the mysteries of God U although his father Polaris (Sean Patrick Thomas) forbids him; and Jordan, well, struggles with their lack of peer recognition along with parental disapproval of their abilities.
If her grades didn't turn out so well, Little Cricket was counting on a career in micro wrestling (which used to be called something else before the Snowflake Era).
It's as NSFW as only The Boys crew can deliver, often making you stop to ask yourself – or anyone brave enough to watch this with you – if you really just saw THAT on TV (but then, this is streaming, remember).
It's vicious, raunchy and vile yet never loses sight of its characters' humanity.
One might even think that regular humanity, in this universe, is evolving a deviousness gene to match the rampant, raw power of the supes.
We've often seen this in the main series, and it's on show again here in the hilarious fourth episode when the true crime genre gets a proper satirical flogging and a "fan-favourite" character from the comics makes his long-awaited TV debut in a way that would probably make Robin exclaim "Holy reality-TV shenanigans, Batman!"
The show also puts its characters through the gamut of dehumanising situations that absolute power can heap upon both those who wield it and the ones on the receiving end.
At the halfway point so far, the young "heroes" of Gen V seem to be holding up pretty well in the face of all these challenges.
But these are formative years, after all, and there are not too many miles to go between fubar in progress, and fubar ad perpetuum.
New episodes of Gen V arrive on Prime Video every Friday.
Summary:
The kids are all blight
