[COLUMN] Is Gen V a Boys Spin-Off or Supplement? | by Darren Mooney

Note: This article contains spoilers of cameos from the first season of Gen V and some minor plot details from the three-episode premiere of the show’s second season, now streaming on Prime Video. If you’re looking for a recommendation, the show is… fine. Much like the first season, it feels more like an interquel than an actual spin-off. It carries over a lot of the sensibility of The Boys with a likeable cast, but also never quite manages to find its own voice or forge its own identity. It’s not required reading, as it were.

Watching the second season of Gen V, a question begins to gnaw at the viewer. Is anybody watching Gen V who is not already tuning into The Boys? More than that, is Gen V designed with any expectation that the audience might not be watching The Boys?

The Boys is one of the most interesting pop culture artifacts of this moment. It is produced by a gigantic (and potentially evil) international corporation about a gigantic (and definitely evil) international corporation. It depicts a culture completely consumed and dominated by superheroes. When the series first launched, it was largely concerned with absurdity of celebrity culture, but has since evolved into a fairly blunt metaphor about a society careening towards totalitarianism.

The Boys is also a massive hit for the service. The show’s fourth season dominated the Neilsen streaming ratings in August 2024, at a time when it seemed like superhero fatigue was in full effect. Amazon’s own-brand superhero show managed to significantly outperform two of the bigger branded offerings in the second half of that year: Marvel Studios’ Agatha All Along and the Star Wars spin-off Skeleton Crew. Homelander (Antony Starr) even appeared in Mortal Kombat 1.

However, there are understandably challenges facing Amazon’s efforts to capitalize on the success of The Boys. The show is wrapping up with its fifth season, which has already finished shooting. This is probably a smart choice. The show runs the risk of getting stuck spinning its wheels if it runs too long and it makes sense to bow out gracefully before “superhero fatigue” reaches critical mass. There is something to be said for allowing a cultural phenomenon to end on its own terms.

The Boys is also a very demanding production. Its cast are in high demand. Jack Quaid has been splitting his time on The Boys with lead roles in two animated series – Star Trek: Lower Decks and My Adventures with Superman – and slew of reasonably significant motion pictures that include Scream, Oppenheimer, Companion, Novocaine and Heads of State. It requires a lot of postproduction. Its five eight-episode seasons will be staggered over a period of seven years.

It makes sense for Amazon to want to capitalize on the success of The Boys, particularly given the difficulty that the streaming service has had turning its other expensive properties like Rings of Power or Citadel into hits. The company launched an animated anthology spin-off, Diabolical, but Gen V is the most obvious attempt to take advantage of the streaming audience’s appetite for more of The Boys, a live-action spin-off set within the world and continuity of the parent series.

To give credit where it is due, Amazon have worked hard to build their own internal franchises. While legacy studios like Disney or Warner Bros. have their own established intellectual property, Amazon has had to grow its own internally. Over the past few years, the streaming service has been chugging along quietly branching out spin-offs and tie-ins for a variety of its own shows. Gen V is just the highest profile example.

In the second half of this year alone, the service has launched Terminal List prequel series Dark Wolf, premiered Ballard spinning out of the Bosch sequel series Legacy, and has scheduled The Mighty Nein spinning off from The Legend of Vox Machina. There is a upcoming stand-alone episode of Helluva Boss, the spin-off from their animated musical series Hazbin Hotel. Last year, the service produced regional spin-offs of Citadel, Diana and Honey Bunny.

All of this is to suggest that the streaming service has begun to operate more like a conventional television production house, capitalizing on hits by generating spin-offs. There is no shame in this. Some of the best television shows of all time were spin-offs. Frasier was spun off from Cheers. Mork and Mindy launched from Happy Days. Star Trek produced The Next Generation and The Next Generation launched Deep Space Nine. Spin-offs are just part of the cycle of television production.

However, many of the best television spin-offs work because they manage to strike out from the parent series. The Next Generation is very different in tone from Star Trek, and Deep Space Nine often seems openly antagonistic to The Next Generation. Frasier has a very different energy from Cheers, and even rewrote some of the parent show’s continuity. It is possible to enjoy Mork and Mindy on its own terms without having ever seen an episode of Happy Days.

This is why the first two seasons of Gen V feel so strange. The show has a unique setting and premise. It unfolds at Godolkin University, also known as “God-U”, the space where young superheroes learn to master their powers. This provides a fresh framework. It can focus on younger characters than The Boys, and it can engage with the ever-shifting (and highly political) contemporary campus culture in a way that feels like an extension of The Boys without feeling like an empty rehash.

On paper, this could be Deep Space Nine to The Next Generation, a show that takes place within the same fictional universe, but shifts location and perspective just enough to feel like a distinct entity. However, in practice, the first two seasons of Gen V feel less like their own show than they do supplemental reading (or perhaps an “elective”) off the back of The Boys. They feel like a bonus feature designed to tide fans over in the long gap between seasons.

Gen V is saturated with cameos from The Boys. The first season included appearances from Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie), A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue), Adam Bourke (P.J. Byrne), The Deep (Chace Crawford) and Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). While a certain amount of continuity is to be expected, the programmatic and almost reliably “one-per-episode” approach draws attention to itself, particularly given The Boys does not reference Gen V in the same way.

There is a clear hierarchy. When Homelander shows up in the first season finale of Gen V, he is given enough narrative weight to essentially resolve the big action climax. When Starlight (Erin Moriarty) appears in the second season premiere of Gen V, she serves to give the spin-off characters their mission for the season. In contrast, when Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) and Sam (Asa Germann) from Gen V cameo in the fourth season finale of The Boys, they are much less plot-centric.

While Gen V can introduce characters like Tek Knight (Derek Wilson), who might go on to appear in The Boys, it is very clear which of the two series has “ownership” of the character. Gen V can seed storylines that will conclude in The Boys, such as Billy Butcher’s (Karl Urban) discovery of a biological weapon to use against the superheroes, but the story is structured so that it makes perfect sense if the viewer only watches The Boys.

It is a very strange approach to writing a spin-off. At times, Gen V can feel like an effort to offer subscribers sixteen more episodes of “content” adjacent to The Boys, media set within the fictional universe, referencing and setting up particular narrative threads, and featuring familiar characters, but never really forging its own distinct or unique identity. It is very difficult to imagine, for example, how the show could work for an audience member who is only watching Gen V.

To be clear, there is a certain charm to this in the comic book logic of the shared universe. Gen V is the classic supplemental book to the flagship title, the sort of project that would be written by Peter Tomasi and illustrated by Patrick Gleason: their Green Lantern Corps running alongside Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern or their Batman & Robin running alongside Grant Morrison’s Batman Incorporated. It’s classic “more of a similar thing” programming than it is an attempt to launch a new thing.

On a certain level, it is nice to get to breathe in the world of The Boys. One of the big issues with the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that the aftermath of Captain America: Civil War or Avengers: Infinity War never really felt like status quos; it never seemed like the characters in the stories were living in those moments, outside of flashbacks and post-hoc references. In contrast, Gen V really does feel like it is unfolding in parallel with the heavily serialized narrative of The Boys.

In particular, the two seasons of Gen V capture the sense of a pendulum shift – particularly contemporary college culture – away from a sort of performative progressive liberalism and towards a regressive reactionary retrenchment. Serial rapist Rufus (Alexander Calvert) boasts about the return of a college fraternity banned in 2014. Jordan (London Thor) arrives at the militaristic training room and wonders, “Didn’t this used to be Big Chief Apache’s Diversity and Equity Centre?”

Understanding that its larger plot mechanics must be exercises in wheel-spinning that cannot alter the status quo driven by the parent series, Gen V works best in smaller moments. The second season’s third episode opens on a human staff member (Julia Knope) enduring humiliation and harassment at the hands of the superpowered administration. She wears a large “H” badge, is subject to invasive screenings, is marched into the campus through the guarded “human entrance.”

While these moments are interesting, providing a glimpse of the lived experience of characters who don’t operate at the level of Homelander or Butcher, Gen V does feel inert. It’s hard for a show tied so strongly to The Boys to generate the stakes necessary to sustain an eight-episode serialized season if the audience understands that nothing that happens within the season could be anything that might potentially confuse a viewer hopping from the fourth to the fifth season of The Boys.

Of course, given that The Boys is wrapping up next year, this does raise interesting questions about the future of Gen V. Will Gen V get a third season? Will The Boys end in a place where Gen V could sustain itself into future seasons, or will The Boys wrap up everything to do with Vought International and superheroes? If Gen V does continue, will these first two seasons have provided a solid enough foundation for the show to tell its own story on its own terms going forward?

These are interesting questions, and they make the possibility of a third season of Gen V seem genuinely compelling. It will be a real test for the show, if it gets that far, but the series has little interest in engaging with that challenge. Unfortunately, Gen V feels like its coasting through the midterms instead of focusing on the final exam.