Is the public's media literacy too low for nuanced television?

With the final series of You out now and the final season of The Boys on the horizon, we explore the legacies of their main characters

Star of the hit Netflix show You Penn Badgley who plays obsessive stalker and serial killer Joe Goldberg and Anthony Starr who plays The Boys anti-hero Homelander, have both recently given interviews with LA Times uncovering something quite disturbing. 

Both characters are examples of writing where characters who do evil things are humanised. At least insofar as their motivations are explained. In You Joe Goldberg is a serial stalker, abuser and eventual killer of women. But through his internal monologue we hear his “rationalisations” which at times almost sound logical. The point of this (one would think) is to illustrate that people who do heinous things are rarely malevolently evil for the sake of it. More challengingly, it is an opportunity to ask ourselves if cultural norms and beliefs we hold are actually that many degrees of separation away from actions we would like to believe we would never be capable of. In the first series notably, Joe has a patronising infantilisation of his muse Beck. He believes she needs a “good guy” like him. His disavows her friends who have superficial interests like social media and artisanal coffees compared to his superior interest, literature. These attitudes are not wholly detached from real world male/female interactions where things predominantly enjoyed by women like pop music or reality television are framed as low brow. You is a challenging watch as a man because at times it is only Joe’s willingness to commit acts of violence, rather than his beliefs, that separate him from the patriarchal norms we are all instilled with.

In The Boys Homelander is introduced to us in the first season as the frontman of The Seven. A corporate backed team of superheroes. As the show goes on it becomes clear that Vought (the corporation behind The Seven) are a fraudulent capital driven entity using the pursuit of “justice” as a cover to extract as much wealth as possible. They violently and covertly wreak havoc and death in pursuit of money, power and influence. Imagine the police or military but with capes and spandex. Homelander’s starring role in this operation (paired with the fact he is the most powerful entity on earth) afford him total impunity for countless civilian murders. It is later revealed that he is also a rapist. Later series explore the origins of his monstrous personality. Being experimented on in a government lab. Denied any love, affection or healthy socialisation in his formative years. As an adult, commodified to the point of near parody. His obvious depression and evil deeds juxtaposed with his position as the world’s most powerful and revered man challenge ideas of traditional masculinity’s capacity to bring contentment. At no point is his origin story framed as a justification for his villainous behaviour. Or so you would think…

Fan reaction to both characters has been disturbingly positive in some quarters. In later series writers seem to have made creative choices to make it clearer to the audience that they are meant to be villains. Protagonists are typically heroes, or at least to be somewhat empathised with in narratives. So it’s possible that the fandom of Joe and Homelander is the result of viewers automatically assuming all stories are written that way. More troubling is the possibility that, as previously mentioned, viewers un-ironically empathise with the actions and beliefs of these fictional serial killers and r****** and don’t actually perceive the shows as attempting to be multilayered. Whichever the reason, it stirred the writers chose to be more explicit in showing Joe’s sexually predatory instincts in the last series. This puts storytellers in an interesting position. As creatives we want to believe our work has the power to move the needle, but if it can only be appreciated by people who already have an understanding of the core issue, then its redundant. The cultural zeitgeist doesn’t need another narrative about characters who are unconscionably evil. But what if creating more complex characters just results in the further normalisation of wrongdoing? In a climate where governments are already fuelling a live streamed genocide and the President of the U.S. was found liable for sexual abuse before getting re-elected, it doesn’t feel useful. 

You and The Boys are great shows and they aren’t to blame for people not understanding them. Their creators still deserve respect for having the ambition to create something equally challenging and entertaining. Any societal positive or negative impact they create is probably quite negligible, but maybe their true value is in what society’s reaction to them tells us about ourselves.

Article by Martyn Ewoma