During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” or rather the Hulu series based on Atwood’s original novel, which just teased its sixth season for early 2025, became a shorthand symbol in the battle for reproductive rights. With its dehumanizing vision of a world that reduces women to breeding vessels held captive, abused and forced to bear children for the wealthy and privileged in a repressive state, the show felt ominously, if not fantastically, aligned with where this country appeared to be heading. But as Trump prepares to re-enter the White House, I see a different streaming show that speaks more directly to this unsettling political moment: Amazon’s dystopian superhero satire “The Boys.”
Since its premiere on Amazon Prime in 2019, the series has often felt like a cautionary tale, a not-so-thinly veiled rumination on the political and media climate that laid the groundwork for Trump.
It might be easily missed behind the colorful spin on comic-book tropes and its abundant helpings of gore and kinky sex, but the series removed its mask long ago when it comes to its warnings about how a toxic stew of celebrity, hero worship and disinformation can lead to autocracy, enabled and fueled by corporate greed, corruption and lust for power.
Adapted from the comics, “The Boys” concluded its fourth season with a chilling resolution setting up its final arc, which isn’t expected to arrive until 2026. In it (and spoiler alert for those yet to take the plunge), a psychologically broken man-child, the Superman-esque Homelander (played by Antony Starr), gained control of the government and claimed sweeping powers under the guise of security and restoring order.
Since its premiere on Amazon Prime in 2019, the series has often felt like a cautionary tale, a not-so-thinly veiled rumination on the political and media climate that laid the groundwork for Trump. After the 2024 election, the similarities, even if cartoonish, feel harder to ignore.
Showrunner Eric Kripke acknowledged as much in a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, saying that Homelander, with his volatile mix of emotional insecurity and power, had “always been a Trump analogue for me,” adding that the character reflected a “bigger issue” — namely, “the more awful public figures act, the more fans they seem to be getting.”
Leaning even more heavily into politics in its most recent season, the series added a new superhero character, Firecracker, who parrots the conservative views espoused by a very Fox News-like TV network, owned by the shadowy corporation behind the superheroes, Vought International. Kripke told Entertainment Weekly that Firecracker represents “the super extreme right-wing news media.”
Like Trump, who leveraged his carefully sculpted and edited image on “The Apprentice” as he segued into politics, “The Boys” resides in a world where Vought uses TV, movies and other media to market the “supes,” so they’re called, to the unsuspecting public.
As depicted in the series, little about the show’s underlying political message is subtle, including a conspiracy-minded group within the show that evokes QAnon. Vought meticulously exploits the gullibility of those true believers, working to blur the lines between entertainment and news under its vast corporate umbrella while wrapping Homelander and his brethren in the American flag and faux patriotism.
Indeed, the cynicism at the heart of “The Boys” is that if you can play the hero convincingly enough, it’s possible to get away with all sorts of terrible behavior. In an ironic twist, “The Boys” has pursued this unflinching vision of autocracy and unbridled capitalism while arguably becoming Amazon Prime Video’s signature franchise, spawning spinoffs (including “Gen V”) and plans for a prequel to carry on once it’s gone. At a time when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has drawn criticism for his decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in another asset, The Washington Post, a fanciful superhero series has forged ahead, hiding its politics in plain sight. The cynicism at the heart of “The Boys” is that if you can play the hero convincingly enough, it’s possible to get away with all sorts of terrible behavior. Reality intruded on “The Boys” in another way when an assassination sequence in the season finale, which premiered close to the attempt on Trump’s life in July, prompted Prime Video to change the title and add a disclaimer to the episode, which was actually filmed last year. With “Handmaid’s Tale” due to end next year and “The Boys’” climax to follow, neither of these programs will continue long into a Trump second term. But each in their own way has spoken through fiction with anger and urgency, warning that the threat of fascism isn’t necessarily the stuff of old black-and-white images. They have also shown the ability to tackle issues in a thoughtful and provocative way, setting forth a challenge for future shows wrapped in a cloak of entertainment to pick up that colorful gauntlet.
Brian Lowry
Brian Lowry is a media columnist and critic, most recently at CNN, and before that Variety and the Los Angeles Times. 
