Gen V is the cure to what ails superhero media

polygon.com:

There is a moment in Gen V, the Gen Z-centric spinoff of X-rated superhero satire The Boys, that actually managed to shock me. I’m going to talk about what that moment was, but first I need to talk a little about what it wasn’t.

It was not the moment, about two minutes into the opening episode, when a girl experiencing her first period manages to accidentally kill both of her parents with telekinetically weaponized menstrual blood. That sequence, which serves as our introduction to the show’s protagonist, Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), is altogether typical of the tone and attitude of the Boysuniverse: a smiling, Grand Guignol glee in the parodic violence of the superhero genre that winks at the audience even as it nauseates us. That, after all, is the place The Boys has staked out in the landscape of superhero media. When Amazon launched the show in 2019, it was at the high watermark of superhero media saturation: the year of Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Shazam!, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and an almost nauseatingly endless list of franchise films slated and imagined. In that environment, the foul-mouthed, cynical spit-take of Eric Kripke’s show — which imagined “supes” as half-witted, media-obsessed stooges of the Vought International corporation — could only feel like a welcome relief.

But 2019 seems a world away now. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, changing tastes, and an almost improbable degree of genre oversaturation, the past year has given us one dud after another that struggled to get audiences even to glace momentarily upward from our phones — whether it was the catastrophic performance of DC’s The Flash or the hollow, empty streaming network thud of Marvel’s Secret Invasion. Against that backdrop, G