Sick of the endless sniping of Billy Butcher in The Boys? I have good news: another show exists in the same universe, and (whisper it) it might even be better than the original.
I’m talking, of course, about Gen V. Set at a university for ‘supes’ named Godolkin (the clue is in the name; pretty much everybody has a serious god complex), the first season served up lashings of blood, dark humour and teenage angst, while running on a roughly parallel timeline to The Boys’ fourth season.
Now it’s back for more. In addition to being the show’s sophomore outing, this is the first season to air after the death of star Chance Perdomo in a motorbike accident in 2024; fittingly, episode one opens with a simple ‘For Chance’.
His character, Andre, still forms a central part of the season two plot. In the first season’s cliffhanger finale, Marie (Jazz Sinclair) Jordan (London Thor/ Derek Luh) and Emma (Lizze Broadway) wound up in supe prison after their classmates Cate (Maddie Phillips) and Sam (Asa Germann) went on a murderous rampage, leaving them to take the blame.
In the show’s opening moments, we find out that while Marie has managed to escape, Andre has died off-screen in prison, and his classmates Jordan (London Thor/ Derek Luh) and Emma (Lizze Broadway) start the season being bundled into a van back to Godolkin.
Once there, they’re swiftly exonerated and, after a press conference, are expected to start their new careers as the face of the university. The blood-slinging Marie, meanwhile, has gone on the run and is trying to juggle living in motels with tracking down her younger sister Annabeth.
After the events of The Boys, the battle lines have been starkly drawn: humans are the enemy, and the superheroes are the future of America. Seriously. The tagline ‘Make America Great Again’ is used several times, the Vought media machine is working overtime to spread fake news and the social media lecturer is a tradwife. “Feminism has killed America,” she chirps at one point; whoever writes the jokes for these shows is just as caustically funny as ever.
At the same time, human employees at God U are getting killed, bullied or threatened with rape at an alarming rate. Andre’s devastated father Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas) is on a revenge-seeking mission. Oh, and there’s a new Dean, the wonderfully sinister Cipher (Hamish Linklater), whose power is a secret – though he seems to be hellbent on pushing his students’ powers to their absolute limit.
Amid all of this, we have an unfolding mystery concerning Marie’s past, which might or might not be connected to the original Thomas Godolkin himself – baffling played by Spongebob/ Wicked’s own Ethan Slater. It’s a lot to be getting on with, but the show deftly juggles plotlines, leaving breathing room as it does for quieter moments that dig into the psyche of the leads. Broadway in particular does great work as the perpetually frazzled Emma, while Phillips is compellingly watchable as the increasingly bruised and battered Cate.
For diehard fans, cameos from The Boys abound: Starlight (Erin Moriarty) pops up at one point, as does Chase Crawford’s loathsome Deep, who is in charge with inducting newbies into a rather horrifying-looking frat ritual. It’s fun, though it does require you to have watched both series to get the most out of seeing them.
It could all read as cliché and overly self-referential, but the show carries it all off with just the right amount of swagger and attitude. God U is just as awful as ever; thank goodness for that.
Gen V is streaming on Prime Video
