‘The Boys’ Season 4 Opens Up 46% Split Between Critic And Audience Scores

The Boys is back with new weekly installments after its three-episode premiere last week, the next one airing tomorrow, Thursday, June 20. And it’s probably a sign of the times that this season, airing two years after the third one, has opened up a wide split between critics and audiences, at least the kind of audience that likes to score things in protest.

You can see what’s happened here, and what’s changed:

The Boys Season 1 - 85% critics, 90% audience
The Boys Season 2 - 97% critics, 83% audience
The Boys Season 3 - 98% critics, 75% audience
The Boys Season 4 - 95% critics, 49% audience

The running theory here is a significant chunk of the audience have realized the play is about them, as The Boys has gotten more and more forceful about its political allegory in that it is barely even an allegory at this point. Season 3 brought Homelander playing out the “Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” storyline quite literally, and now Season 4 has gone straight into Qanon and Pizzagate territory, with a man showing up to Starlight’s youth shelter with a gun to “free the kids,” something that also literally happened to the pizza place in the absurd Pizzagate conspiracy. Meanwhile, showrunner Eric Kripke has said outright that new supe/podcast host Firecracker was directly inspired by conservative representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

There are also the previous comments from Kripke which specifically say he does not care what this portion of the audience thinks:

“I clearly have a perspective, and I’m not shy about putting that perspective in the show. Anyone who wants to call the show “woke” or whatever, that’s OK. Go watch something else. But I’m certainly not going to pull any punches or apologize for what we’re doing.

forbes.com