The first year at uni can be explosive…

Gen V has been an excellent season away from The Boys. Tangential to the main series yet, for my money, more compelling and absolutely more essential viewing in Prime.

Almost all the way through the show has centred the experiences of young people with little clue of who they are and what they’re capable of. It’s a perfect allegory for youth in modern western society – deliberately neutered by adults who praise their helplessness while at the same time working hard to ensure that the agency expressed by young people is ‘of the right kind’.

After all, if young people were allowed to grow properly angry at injustice, to exercise real agency they might just discover how powerful they are and what they’re truly capable of. For a society that idolises the old and those with money, youth is a wasted commodity on the young, useful only for channelling those who hold it into spaces where, in future, they’ll consume as directed.

Gen V pulls no punches in exposing this level of cynicism on screen and if you feel it might be over the top then I’ve a social media app for you to sign up to, no, don’t read the terms and conditions, they’ll not be adhered to anyway.

The story here explores the control of young people’s lives – be it how they conduct their bodies, how they eat, how they enjoy themselves, their aspirations, their desire and even what they’re allowed to hope for.

If extremism hovers around the edges of such lives it should, perhaps, come as no surprise, because if a person’s life is controlled in nearly every aspect they will absolutely seek to exercise agency in the small spaces still not colonised by the world around them. It’s both depressing, smartly insightful and angry as all hell.

Gen V is superior to The Boys in most ways – specifically where it has freedom to chart its own course.

Where is isn’t able to do that it suffers from the same challenges as The Boys – namely that for all its lampooning of the conventions of the genre it remains bound by them and for all its acidic bile for capitalism it is a child of such a market and cannot think its way out of that box.

This is most clearly seen in the last episode where the explosive threads come together to somehow be less than the sum of their parts, constrained for fear of criticism (and with the show’s only trigger warning which will only make sense to US audiences because they’re the only country on earth to suffer school violence as they do because they have, as a society, chosen to value violence more highly than the lives of their children).

Not only that but because it can’t escape from the same old conventions that shackle Marvel and DC, the show ends with a whimper instead of a valedictory or even an apocalypse. Right up until this point it was careering towards being some of the bet satire to slash our minds in the last few years but it lost its way at the end. You could say the anarchic mask fell away to reveal the corporate mechanisms co-opting youthful disaffection for monetary gains.

The appearance of Butcher and Homelander only drives home that Gen V is subordinate to the grown ups in the room and they are creatures of the money that gives them life.

I might sound a little like a disgruntled leftist here but really I’m a disappointed creative – watching what has been a smartly written satire fail to land because it can’t escape the thing it’s satirising. Like a beautifully unexpected flower which turns out to be the end result of Japanese knotweed taking hold in your garden.

Perhaps my main frustration was the lack of catharsis offered by the end of the season. In this, as with so many genre shows, it’s not an uncommon feature of the viewing experience.

Verdict: Still, Gen V remains a highlight of 2023. Funny, caustic, violent, pointed and, at times, bleak as a nuclear wasteland.

8 weird experiments out of 10

Stewart Hotston