‘Gen V’ Review: Amazon’s Super-Youth Rebellion Stalls Over Franchise Demands

If Prime Video’s “The Boys‘” slow submission to superhero franchising’s demands over the course of its four years on streaming has left your stomach roiling, slam a shot of Pepto-Bismol and relax; it’s part of the routine. Superhero projects are nothing if not designed for easy spin-offs, an expectation codified in contemporary television and movies 10 years ago when “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” premiered on ABC and initiated the second phase of superhero Content™’s ruthless campaign against all other extant forms of visual storytelling. Today, everything, even non-superhero fare – even “John Wick” – is a potential shared universe in waiting, whether viewers want it or not.

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That “The Boys,” a series critical of this practice as contextualized in superhero productions (broadly) and the MCU (specifically), should shrug and put up scaffolding for its own shared universe feels like hypocrisy, except that to date, its subsidiary materials – the current affairs broadcast parody “Seven on 7,” and the animated anthology “Diabolical” – are worth watching; they do the work of either expanding on or otherwise adding welcome flavor to the main dish, without forcing the audience to partake just so they can keep up with a show they’re already invested in. It helps to keep your supplements to a crisp runtime between one minute and 15. It also helps that these shows tell the same joke, and make the same commentary, as “The Boys” without repeating the same punchlines. 

“Gen V,” the latest ancillary chapter in “The Boys’” satire of our superhero-obsessed popular culture, asks a good bit more from viewers than its predecessors. Each episode clocks in at the same length as an episode of “The Boys,” with a predominantly new cast of characters to get to know and a couple appearing as connective tissue between the two shows: Colby Minfie appears as Ashley Barrett, the long-suffering erstwhile Director of Talent Relations and also-erstwhile CEO of Vought International; P.J. Byrne shows up briefly as Adam Bourke, an in-house Vought propagandist fallen far from grace and stuck teaching for Godolkin University, where most of the show takes place; Jessie T. Usher is seen briefly as A-Train, on the day of his ascension to the Seven, the most powerful and renowned superhero team on the planet.

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A-Train’s historical televised moment is Eric Kripke’s segue from “The Boys” to “Gen V,” which he developed alongside Evan Goldberg and Craig Rosenberg. (Kripke originally adapted “The Boys” for Amazon based on the Garth Ennis comic books of the same name.) From A-Train’s press conference to American family’s living rooms, we see a superhero origin story in tragic close-up: A teenager gets her first period, which sparks her latent superpowers, which go haywire in a torrent of blood and leave both of her parents dead on the bathroom floor. All she can do is huddle in shock. All her little sister can do is scream. Years later, the teen, Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), is grown up and eager to stake her claim in the world by making her name in the superhero world. At least that way, her mother and father’s deaths wouldn’t be total wastes.

Marie fulfills the same role as Erin Moriarity’s Starlight in “The Boys”: That of the witness, she who enters superherodom possessed of wide-eyed notions about truth, justice, and other ideals revealed as pathetic bullshit under the harsh light of reality. Being a superhero, in “Gen V” as in “The Boys,” isn’t about justice. It most certainly isn’t about truth. It’s about branding, it’s about social media stats, it’s about personality, it’s about everything other than defending innocent lives in honor of that most famous of superhero credos: With great power comes great responsibility. The responsibility is there. It just isn’t intended for the civilian populace. Responsibility is instead accorded to construction of one’s public profile, and this is why Marie lies about her past, claims her parents are still alive, and bites her tongue so she can smile at the cameras, at the wealthy donors, at Indira Shetty (Shelley Conn), Godolkin’s superintendent, who, like the worst antagonists in “The Boys,” has no superpowers, but makes up for it with a breathtaking preternatural talent for deception and manipulation.

The parallels between “The Boys” and “Gen V” don’t run terribly deep. They’re right there, surface level, staring the viewer in the face, practically nose-to-nose. It’d be nice for the franchise to try something genuinely new within its defined bounds, rather than repurpose plot points that go back to its very first season, but in a way that’s the point: The money-and-clout machine of Vought International, a stand-in for major studios building their own shared superhero universes, is inescapable, trickling down through social, political, and class hierarchies as they do so that even kids learning how to hone their powers wind up focused on honing image. When Marie goes out partying with Godolkin’s cool kids – Andre Anderson (Chance Perdomo), Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips), Jordan Li (Derek Luh, but also sometimes London Thor; the character’s a gender-shifter), and most of all Luke Riordan (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the school’s literal and figurative Golden Boy – one character’s powers go awry, a civilian is mortally wounded, and the gang flees, save Marie. 

Marie stays behind. She saves the dying woman’s life. She proudly struts back to Godolkin expecting a pat on the back, and she gets expelled for her troubles while her cohorts pointedly do not. Image matters. Actions don’t – or do, but only if they’re taken on behalf of image curation. This all happens in the premiere episode, “God U,” and presents “Gen V” with an immediate double-edged sword: On one hand the incident exposes Godolkin and Vought’s nobler assertions as craven, hollow garbage. On the other, there is no cliché more wearisome in the “teenage [superhero] / [monster] / [wizard] / [whatever] school” genre than “main character gets kicked out of school on the first day,” because what good is a season opener if not to get the main character into the damn classroom? Enrollment and registration snafus don’t make for especially compelling television when the setting’s single most significant character is an Evil Fascist Superman with whom Freud would have a field day. 

“Gen V” works best whenever the characters mire in existential despair over the bill of goods sold them by their parents, their media, and their college authority figures; picking up on a thread left dangling in an episode of “Diabolical,” one young supe in particular rages at his absentee parents for feeding him Compound V, the chemical serum responsible for turning mortal humans into supes in “The Boys,” as a baby. It’s a universal experience. Marie was given the serum as a little, too. They all were. And then they were raised in a culture that told them they were special, only to learn far too late, as they come of age, that they’re not, the culture doesn’t care about them, and all they’re good for is boosting ratings. Saving life is cheap. 

The show steadily emphasizes the thought that, perhaps, lying to kids about the world they’re going to inherit and fudging the place they’ll hold in it is a dick move, and in the case of kids who can, oh, say, self-immolate or turn blood into a lethal projectile, an extremely stupid idea. “The Boys” maintains a throughline of control: Men and women in suits can keep a tight leash on super-teens capable of leveling buildings, but if regular teens are remarkably adept at rebellion, then super-teens are probably much better at it. 

Watching Sinclair wrestle through the conflict between her morals and her obligations as Godolkin’s new It Girl is a pleasure; when she shows poise, she still reveals flashes of doubt and distaste in her circumstances, and vice versa. Marie is a young woman at war with herself, a fleshed-out reflection of Luke, who takes his own “war with self” to the utmost extreme. “Gen V’s” primary plot comes together in the fallout of his personal angst, with plenty of giddy carnage and giddier perversions – including a truly one of a kind sex scene that makes the one in “The Boys”’ Season 3 premiere feel passé – to bolster the narrative. But there’s a looseness to “Gen V” in the early going that clangs with its youthful urgency, and this exacerbates the effect of the symmetry the show shares with “The Boys.” “Gen V” shouldn’t ignore its progenitor, of course. Not at all. It should, however, have a little more personality of its own, if not to complement its snapshots of powered teenagers in revolt, then to give it fuller distinction. [B-]

“Gen V” debuts on Prime Video on September 29.