The Boys and Umbrella Academy are finally doing more with their marginalized characters
Superheroes: they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. This is, at its core, the basic premise of Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys and Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, two of the most subversive superhero shows on television. Though vastly different, when they premiered in 2019 both offered a diverse alternative superhero team to the overwhelmingly white and male Avengers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But neither honored that diversity — until now.
Diversity wasn’t the only thing that set Umbrella Academy and The Boys apart in 2019. Whereas the Marvel Cinematic Universe had taken a mostly optimistic approach to superheroes, The Boys and The Umbrella Academy provided viewers with a more gritty and, sadly, grounded take. As an R-rated superhero satire about a world in which superheroes are real and extremely corporate, The Boys offered a more sinister lens on superhero fandom. In the show, Vought Industries has manufactured a drug to create superpowers, and it used this power to create The Seven, the world’s most prestigious superhero group. Led by Homelander (Anthony Starr), essentially a white supremacist Captain America, The Seven include The Deep (Chace Crawford), Starlight (Erin Moriarty), Queen Maeve (Claudia Doumit), A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell).
In contrast, The Umbrella Academy is less of a critique of the genre, though season 1 did briefly explore the pitfalls of superhero stardom. It focuses on the Hargreeves siblings — Viktor (known by a different name in seasons 1 and 2) (Elliot Page), Luther (Tom Hopper), Diego (David Castañeda), Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Klaus (Robert Sheehan), Five (Aidan Gallagher), and Ben (Justin H. Min) — who were adopted as children by an eccentric
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