The success of this series is beyond dispute. But anyone who has read the comic it is based on knows that, in the end, it is a missed opportunity — a wasted chance to do something genuinely transformative for television and the superhero genre.
The success of this series is beyond question. But anyone who has read the comic it is based on knows that, in the end, it amounts to a missed opportunity—an occasion wasted, a chance to genuinely do something revolutionary for television and the superhero genre.
The finale of The Boys, available alongside all the other episodes on Prime Video, closes a chapter that is far larger than the series itself. A chapter that, more or less, began seven years ago, and which once again reopened the debate around original works versus adaptations, comics versus TV series. It promised a great deal—irony, satire, a razor-sharp critique of our present—and then, as so often happens, gradually mutated into something else entirely, chasing a very commercial—and therefore, let’s say it, rather hollow—idea of success.
The Boys is based on the comic of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, published in Italy by Panini Comics. Its premise is deceptively simple: superheroes exist in the world, and they are controlled by a multinational corporation that owns television networks, newspapers, real estate, and media assets, and also produces films (the immediate reference for everyone at the time was Marvel, and the overdose of superhero cinema we were all drowning in around 2019).
The “boys” of the title are ordinary people—agents, mercenaries, regular men—who, for one reason or another, come together to fight the most powerful superheroes on earth, including Homelander, because they are corrupt, out of control, and a public danger.
And so we arrive at the first major revelation: the good guys can also be bad. And in fact, sometimes they are worse than the villains they claim to oppose. Obviously, we are dealing with an extreme, exaggerated setup, but the parallels with our own present are hard to miss: the return of absolutist thinking, the deep crisis of democracy, and the effects—more or less explicit, more or less visible—of an unrestrained capitalist culture operating without meaningful control.
Flash forward.
The Boys, the series, becomes a hit. Some even go so far as to do the unthinkable and rank it among the “greatest TV series of all time” (Rolling Stone and Forbes included).
It becomes so successful that Amazon decides to continue it, renew it, expand it. Showrunner Eric Kripke does what he can. He shifts direction several times—at first almost imperceptibly, then more overtly, with the introduction of new characters and the announcement of spin-offs and parallel series.
But ideas begin to run thin. And so what were once seen as brilliant, innovative, even shocking insights start to be repeated into exhaustion: sexual references, blood, more sexual references, more blood. Violence that is no longer a metaphor for something broader and more sincere—our everyday unease, the ongoing political crisis—but simply violence.
And while for a while this works, after a couple of seasons—specifically the third and fourth—something starts to break. And that something is the audience’s trust.
Kripke senses the problem and tries to patch it up. He makes promises, recentres the narrative on moral corruption and the instability of “goodness,” and attempts to tie up the many—sometimes too many—open storylines built up over time to support new characters or spin-offs (Gen V, incidentally, was cancelled after its second season).
All the extraordinary potential of the original comic, and of the early seasons, seems to dissolve into nothing. And the fifth season does not exactly begin on the right foot: after a few connective episodes, filler takes over—episodes full of very little—and the finale approaches.
The audience becomes increasingly divided: on one side long-time fans, on the other those who have turned their doubts into firm convictions.
Then the finale arrives, and it is clear that Kripke did what he could—that he and the writing team tried to manage expectations and pressure as best they could, and that they attempted, partially successfully and partially not, to close all the narrative threads opened over seven years and five seasons.
The villains lose, the heroes win. And there is even space, at the last moment, for the moral greyness that has always mirrored us back to ourselves—our mediocrity, our blur, our stupidity, our fixation with power and violence.
But it is not enough. Because an intelligent ending—not a great one, not a perfect one, not a masterpiece, just an intelligent one—is not sufficient to resolve so many structural problems and close half a dozen narrative arcs in a satisfying way.
A finale like this feels like an obligation fulfilled rather than an achievement, a missed opportunity more than a conclusion. Amazon wanted its flagship series, and it got it. But the story, and everything that was once compelling in The Boys, has ended up diluted and dispersed.
Within 24 hours of the final episode’s release, social media filled with questions: what happened to this character, where is that one, what an idiotic ending for someone else. Of course, there are also those who loved everything—the fifth season, the series, the finale—and who expected nothing more.
Now it will be the turn of spin-offs, prequels, and who knows, sequels too (the finale leaves room for that as well). But of the political and social subtext, of that sharp, biting critique of capitalism and the American dream, very little remains. In truth, almost nothing.
Everything changed so that nothing would change.
And yes, there are references—more or less explicit—to the comic, and there is even an attempt to faithfully recreate certain panels (the White House, the final confrontation, and so on). But the citationality itself feels less like storytelling and more like an aesthetic exercise.
The Boys clung to its characters and convinced itself it had found a golden goose, only to discover it had taken on too much.
It started well, and ended like Game of Thrones: rushed, caught between the pressures of success and ever-diminishing budgets.
Out in the real world, reality ended up overtaking fiction: Donald Trump, his re-election, the United States involved in multiple theatres of war, and the suffocating rhetoric of the far right.
Perhaps the real problem lies elsewhere. Perhaps it is the way we consume these narratives today—filling them with expectations and projections, riding this relentless hype that demands constant enthusiasm, constant excitement, constant revolution-in-the-making.
But in television, as in comics, many ideas have already been used and exhausted, and countless stories have already been told better than we could retell them.
What is sold to the audience is enthusiasm, not television series or films.
And so, in the end, we are left with a fifth season like that of The Boys: suspended between too many things, too many premises, too many reassurances. A season stripped of real dramatic force, inflated by marketing, and ultimately reduced by audience judgment.
And it is not about ratings—the latest symptom of an era in which Letterboxd and score aggregates matter more than argument. It is about the awareness of what could have been, and was not. About the disappointment of those who, perhaps, had read the comic and expected something else.
And about the missed opportunity to finally, truly do something new—not for television in general, not really.
But for superhero stories.