With Heart, Humor, and Horror, 'Gen V' Is a Rewarding Spinoff

By Alison Lanier | TV | October 3, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | October 3, 2023 |

The Boys is a ripe hit show for a hit spinoff. In fact, it more or less demands a spinoff, considering, in The Boys, we only see one tiny corner of the richly built world of “supes.” The show spells vast and complicated corporate conspiracy: In The Boys, superheroes are a corporate product — that corporation being the insanely powerful and far-reaching Vought. Supes are created by a drug called compound V, transforming the supposedly natural or divine gifts of the superpowers — depending on your worldview — into a ploy by a megacorporation to produce the real-life version of blockbuster heroes.

Gen V is that spinoff: set at the Vought-owned-and-operated Godolkin University (GodU, yes, it’s very subtle), where college-aged superpowered young adults are fed into pipelines of either the performing arts or flashy crimefighting. The university has the transparent goal of creating Vought’s next batch of superpowered products. It’s like an elite training facility for athletes, with a seriously messed up side of violent manipulation and corruption, as well as frequent Vought-board-approved student rankings.

The show centers Marie (Jaz Sinclair), a superpowered young woman who is fighting tooth-and-nail to stay in good graces at the school after the violent discovery of her powers left her orphaned and in a group home. At the university, she quickly falls in with a fast-living crowd — Andre (Chance Perdomo), a legacy hero with a powerful ex-hero father (Sean Patrick Thomas); Cate (Maddie Phillips), a mind-control aficionado; Jordan Li (London Thor and Derek Luh), a bigender energy-bending powerhouse; and, centrally, Luke AKA “Goldenboy” (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the recognizable Homelander figure of the show — who takes a drastically different turn. Marie’s roommate, Emma (Lizze Broadway in a delightful performance), rounds out the crew with her ability to shrink or grow in size … almost at will.

As with so many coming-of-age stories, one disastrous night out sets in motion a destructive and illuminating path that sets the core crew on a journey of discovery about themselves and their world. This is The Boys-turned-teen-drama, with the same brutal black humor (and the same frequency of blood and dick jokes: never fear) and characters far less equipped to combat the horrific truths of the superhero industry.

Also on deck are Dean Indira Shetty (Shelley Conn), a subtle and manipulative power-player in the university system, and Clancy Brown (in his sixteenth role in 2023 alone) as star professor Rich Brinkerhoff, who molds members of the Seven from the ground up via the Crimefighting major.

Like its parent program, Gen V also swings for iconically gory moments. Punch through the stomach and fist comes out the mouth, anyone? Gore literally raining from the sky? I could go on. Besides the blood and guts practical effects, the show makes several flexes on visual effects-like switching out actors mid-action-hero-leap.

In my estimation, it’s not quite up to the level of The Boys, but it comes close … and frankly, The Boys set a high hurdle to clear with a stacked cast and a huge amount of material to draw from. Gen V is drawn from one single arc of the comic. It leans hard on the foundation built in the original show, and the two work well in tandem, but Gen V is not its own beast. It’s a deeper dive into the world and does pretty much necessitate having watched The Boys first. The writing doesn’t seem to have received the same attention as it does in the main show, and the editing during conversation makes some jarring choices and rapid-fire cuts. But the heart, humor, and horror are all there in spades.

It’s absolutely worth a watch for fans of The Boys. Gen V delivers a fresh perspective on a world we’ve already spent three seasons exploring, a great franchise-expanding chance to deepen the tight storytelling of the original show. To what new depraved depths will this offshoot take us? We’ve got five more episodes to find out.

The first three episodes are now streaming on Vought+…excuse me, on Prime.

(Also…I know, Chance Perdomo. Isn’t it fun when folks tell on themselves? But that’s another article.”