It’s the job of many writers who do reviews and recaps to get them out quickly. Everyone wants their content out first. But this was an episode of THE BOYS that I really need to sit on a bit. On one hand, the show did a parody of my actual superhero character and a play on another favorite. I loved that; it was the best thing about the show so far this season. On the other hand, I hated everything else about this episode, DIRTY BUSINESS. I sat on a 😊 for a bit, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized this was the worst episode of THE BOYS I’ve seen.
First things first. My favorite superhero comes from DC Comics. My pets are named after characters in that universe. I use parts of their story a lot in my life. I’ve cosplayed as characters from the stories. I’ve had parties themed after them. I mean I REALLY love this character. I love their comics. I love their TV shows, I love their movies. I own art based on them, you get the idea. So seeing THE BOYS do their take on this character was delightful. And much like all the supes in THE BOYS, they were terrible people, of course. And that was great. I didn’t expect them to be any different than the Seven. So it’s with real disappointment that the rest of the episode was so bad.
I’ve written before about how this season has felt tired and so much of the same. DIRTY BUSINESS is no different. But the issues go far beyond that. I obviously want to avoid spoilers (or you wouldn’t be reading this) but I need to point out that this episode features sexual assault. And not the kind we’ve seen on the show before that we knew was bad, was played as bad. This was played for laughs. On a character who has already been taken down a few notches this season. THE BOYS kicked them down again and everyone laughed but me. I know this show wants to shock. It wants to gross us out. I’m okay with that. It’s been shocking. It’s been fun. It’s been weird. I like all of those things. But this wasn’t fun. It was shocking but in a “trying too hard” way. It was weird, but not any weirder than the show has been in the past. It was just mean for the sake of being mean. And it was assault.. And I don’t consider assault ever funny. It kicked down on someone we’re supposed to be rooting for, just for the sake of a joke that didn’t land.
That wasn’t the only bad part. THE BOYS S4 has really amped up making fun of right-wing fascists. They deserve it too. I normally applaud making them the butt of the joke. But there’s nothing new here in DIRTY BUSINESS. We’ve heard it all before. We know these people are terrible, the writers don’t need to continually hit us over the head with that fact.
I can’t review this episode without mentioning something that I saw coming a mile away. There’s a tender scene that was meant to surprise and pull on our heartstrings a little. And maybe if I was surprised, it would have worked. But since it’s something I figured out at the beginning of this season it fell flat to me. Lazy. A tired trope writers use when they’ve run out of anything new. It’s good that the show is ending next season, but it could have successfully gone off after S4 and maybe it should have. Because at that point, it feels like a long, tedious road to wrap this up.
THE BOYS streams on Thursday nights on Prime Video.
