Making any show — much less a raunchy, vulgar and hyper-violent one — tackle the subject of political assassinations is always a risky endeavor.
Making any show tackle the subject of political assassinations when one of your characters is an admitted analog to a real-world politician? That seems like an objectively bad idea — and one that Amazon Prime Video has inadvertently waded into.
The streaming platform’s immensely popular superhero show “The Boys” found itself in such a controversy when its season finale, released Thursday, featured a storyline that hewed a little too close to the real-life attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday.
Now, most shows would have been able to lean on the excuse that the script was written and conceived a long time before the shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
(Which is true.)
But most shows do not feature a professed and clear analog to Donald Trump.
As noted by The Hollywood Reporter, “The Boys” creator/showrunner Eric Kripke has made it clear that the show is about the former president.
“Suddenly, we were telling a story about the intersection of celebrity and authoritarianism and how social media and entertainment are used to sell fascism,” Kripke said about the direction in which he took the show after Trump won the 2016 presidential election.
The analog for Trump on “The Boys” is Antony Starr’s psychotic Homelander character.
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In the show’s Season 4 finale, Homelander — think Superman if he were an utterly deranged sociopath with mommy issues — has effectively hatched a plot to become the president.
That plot involves, you guessed it, the assassination of a political figure. Ironically enough, the newly deceased character was something of an analog for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Homelander then framed “the good guys” (for lack of a better term in the morally ambiguous show) for the assassination and pinned the whole plot on the president-elect.
That, in turn, triggered the president-elect’s removal through the 25th Amendment, and Homelander was sworn in by the speaker of the House as the new president of the United States.
The character opted for this route after a shape-shifting assassin previously attempted to assassinate the president-elect.
That whole plotline, rife with political violence, has triggered two immediate responses from “The Boys.”
First, the show released a statement on social media and added a “viewer discretion” warning that precedes the episode, according to the New York Post.
“The season finale of The Boys contains scenes of fictional political violence, which some viewers may find disturbing, especially in light of the injuries and tragic loss of life sustained during the assassination attempt on former President Trump,” the statement read.
“The Boys is a fictitious series that was filmed in 2023, and any scene or plotline similarities to these real-world events are coincidental and unintentional,” it said.
“Amazon, Sony Pictures Television and the producers of The Boys reject, in the strongest terms, real-world violence of any kind.”
Second, Amazon Prime renamed the episode from “Assassination Runs” to “Season Four Finale.”
All episodes of “The Boys” are streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
