‘Gen V’ Hit Just as Hard as ‘The Boys,’ Becoming the Best TV Spinoff of 2023

No matter which way you slice it, The Boys is a tough act to follow. Prime Video's satirical superhero drama is violent, disgusting, and a pitch-perfect skewer of American pop culture and politics that holds nothing back, and so the pressure was on when it came to its first spinoff Gen V.

The new series is set at a college for kids with superpowers, highlighting a younger generation of supes who idolize the characters of The Boys but are still learning to embrace their abilities and their adulthood. And while college is a notoriously tough setting, showrunner Eric Kripke figured it out. Gen V is about as perfect and perfectly horrifying as a Boys spinoff could be.

The show goes particularly hard on young womanhood and the frequent horrors of femininity. One student's underestimated power includes quickly switching between male and female sex, and there's a character whose power is a literal manifestation of body image and eating disorders. When she eats, she grows large. When she throws up, she gets very small.

It's the series' opening scenes that really hammer the point home, though: Marie (Jaz Sinclair) is a young teen in a world where parents dosed their babies with Compound V in hopes of raising superheroes. Marie's powers hadn't shown up yet at the start of the series, but the delay became clear when she got her first period. Her blood did not act like blood should, and when her parents burst in out of concern, they basically got stabbed to death with blood knives. How much more overtly symbolic can you get than a woman whose dangerous superpower involves turning blood into weapons?

Just like The Boys, Gen V is not subtle, and in fact, the spinoff might actually do an even better job of getting its themes to hit home by presenting them in the form of college students finding their place in the world: You can construct whatever public image you want, but all that repressed darkness can only stay hidden for so long. Eventually, something's going to explode, whether it's a whole person or just a piece of one.

Honorable Mentions