‘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 cKripke 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.

This reminds me of the famous Brie Larson quote about wanting more female industry critics, which got her painted a villain for the better part of a decade and her movie review bombed to be below almost all other Marvel projects. This is way, way more explicit, however.

It does seem that as of late the pushback to “woke” media has gotten much more pronounced. I just wrote about how The Acolyte has been review bombed into oblivion with a 14% score placing it well below any other Star Wars project in history, including the Holiday Special, with constant complaints from outraged fans and YouTubers about plot points like “lesbian witches” allegedly altering Star Wars canon.

This appears to be happening with The Boys as its commentary gets less and less subtle. And it’s been fed into the outraged machine as a result. Here are some of the YouTube results when you simply search for “The Boys review:”

• The Boys: INSUFFERABLY WOKE now? (this is the top result out of everything)
• The Boys season 4 Gets DESTORYED by Fans After Woke Showrunner Tells Fans to Go F*ck Themselves
• The Boys Season 4: Woke Dumpster Fire

And I was unironically served a “The Acolyte Episode 4 is F***ing Brain Rot (Review)” search result in the same list, if that gives you any indication about the links here.

I made my own commentary earlier that I think The Boys is being a little too obvious now by exactly replicating real world events, even if my politics fully align with Kripke’s. That is one of the common complaints here, and I don’t think it helps the season, but overall I think it’s still going well so far. We’ll see how things play out as the episodes unfold.

Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.