College-Set Spinoff Gen V Brings Young Adult Drama to The Boys Franchise

Prime Video’s The Boys is not an obvious candidate to launch a superhero franchise. The original series, which is dark, raunchy, and deeply cynical, spends most of its time openly delighting in satirizing the basics of superhero storytelling as we understand it today. In the world of The Boys, superheroes are just as likely to be murderers and fascists as they are do-gooders, propped up by a mega-corporation that’s more interested in ratings than saving lives. Can a scathing superhero send-up like this, one that revels in mocking everything connected to late stage capitalism and influencer culture, successfully participate in the same systems it so avidly makes fun of? With the launch of Gen V, the story of a university full of young supes training to become the household name heroes of tomorrow, The Boys franchise certainly seems more than willing to try. 

Ostensibly about the first generation of superheroes who had their powers injected into them—whose parents chose to dose them with Compound V and weren’t born with their special abilities—Gen V is a coming-of-age tale on literal steroids, as students are not only asked to compete against one another for prestige and opportunity, but forced to confront ethical questions about what kind of hero they want to grow up to become. (A darker question than one might initially assume, as anyone who has ever watched The Boys knows.) Throw in some standard college-age debauchery and the sort of youthful idealism the original series only ever allowed Starlight to represent, and it makes for an entertaining ride, even if the show never manages to stray too far from the original The Boys blueprint.

Gen V predominantly follows the story of Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), a foster kid with a disturbing blood-bending ability who is accepted to the prestigious supe institution Godolkin University despite the fact that she’s poor, is relatively unknown, and has no social media footprint to speak of. As she settles into this new world of young superheroes all angling for brand deals and chasing the ultimate dream of being named protector of a major city, or maybe even joining the ranks of the Seven one day, she struggles to figure out where she fits in. But when a tragic event involving a fellow student thrusts her into the limelight, Marie suddenly finds herself with more influence and opportunity than she ever expected, and she’ll have to decide how far she’s willing to go to keep those things and what kind of hero she’s trying to become.

Along the way, Marie meets an assortment of intriguing new faces with whom she shares rivalries, flirtations, and something like friendship over the course of the six episodes available to screen for critics (out of a total of eight). Marie’s roommate Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway) is a sweet, insecure YouTube influencer whose abilities allow her to shrink. Handsome Luke Riordan (Patrick Schwarzenegger) can burst into flame and is so popular and generally charismatic his nickname is actually Golden Boy. Stereotypical popular girl—and Luke’s girlfriend—Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) is an empath who can push people to do anything she commands as long as she’s touching them when she does so.  Rich kid Andre Anderson (Chance Perdomo) has magnetic abilities and intends to take over his famous father’s superhero identity (“Polarity”) after he retires. And Jordon Li (London Thor and Derek Luh) is a gender-shifting supe whose abilities manifest differently depending on whether they are presenting as male or female. As the group is drawn further into the mystery of what’s happening in a mysterious campus location known simply as “The Woods,” the core group finds their lives increasingly entangled in interesting and complicated ways. 

As spinoffs go, Gen V is remarkably faithful to the series that spawned it. The series ticks enough familiar boxes that, if you love The Boys, you’ll at least like Gen V, which is compulsively watchable for all the same reasons its parent series is: off-color humor, torrents of blood, an array of superpowers that are often as ridiculous as they are useful. The spinoff abandons some of the original series’ overt cynicism in favor of more youthful fun, as an assortment of impetuous superheroes compete to top their collegiate ranking system and engage in plenty of good old Riverdale-style romantic drama. Gen V wholeheartedly leans into the vibe that any one of the series’ attractive leads could essentially start making out at any moment, and the chaotic messiness of the characters’ interpersonal relationships is one of the show’s best elements. College, am I right?

Unfortunately, also like The Boys, Gen V also contains an overly convoluted conspiracy plot at its center, which might be more impactful—or at least vaguely more interesting— if we hadn’t already spent three seasons on a completely different show learning about all the ways that any organization even vaguely connected to Vought International is basically going to be run by the absolute worst people on Earth, and is undoubtedly hiding some deeply horrible secret from the world at large. The mystery of the mysterious doings in “The Woods”  isn’t as interesting as the show wants it to be, but the inventive ways that Gen V uses the students’ search for the truth to explore their various personal traumas—like every other superhero in this universe, each of these characters is wrestling with deep emotional scars—almost makes it worth it.

Gen V isn’t a particularly groundbreaking series. It’s not trying a new format or formula, it isn’t really playing with things like genre or tone. It works because it doesn’t stray too far from what viewers expect from a The Boys-adjacent series and, as a result, it’s equally fun and ridiculous by turns. Its more youthful setting does allow Gen V to explore a slightly different set of timely but disturbing scenarios that play out the idea of super abilities to their most uncomfortable ends, often related to questions of consent in a world where horny young adults who can exercise various forms of mind control exist and themes of self-worth when so much of one’s value is tied to their number of social media followers or visible public persona.

At the end of the day, this is a series that feels like an extension of what we have seen before, rather than something new. And while, at this point, it’s certainly fair to question whether things like fountaining blood and viscera or penis jokes have run their course, at least you know what you’re getting. And there’s something to be said for a good (if familiar) time.

Gen V premieres Friday, September 29th on Prime Video. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

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