Let’s be clear: Prime Video’s The Boys traffics very deliberately in the language of our modern political collapse, filtering iconography, language, and ideas through the madly smiling face of Antony Starr’s malevolent (and depressingly popular) Homelander. Still, not even series showrunner Eric Kripke seems to know what to make of what sometimes feel like very specific moves by reality to line itself up with his deliberately absurdist show. Like, nobody can plan to debut an episode of a satirical TV show with a golden statue of your Trump analogue being unveiled one week, only to have the man himself roll out his own 22-foot-tall gilded image just a few days later. Kripke seems to have been left in the same boat as the rest of us by the rush of life imitating art that was supposed to make life look kind of stupid, sharing Instagram memes from fans expressing a baffled “Seriously, what the fuck?”
