You Can Now Binge-Watch The Boys From Start To Finish

3 hours ago 12

The age of streaming has made TV more convenient and available, but it’s also made the process of watching TV a lot more annoying. Whereas the old-hat networks would order as many episodes as possible as fast as possible to appease their advertisers, streamers make as few episodes as possible as slowly as possible to keep stringing their subscribers along. So, where we once got a 24-episode season of 24 every year, we now get an eight-episode season of Stranger Things or The Mandalorian every two or three or four years.

There are still some shows that pump out a new season every year, like The Bear and The Pitt. But ever since Netflix introduced the binge-watching model into our lives, the traditional weekly release schedule of your average TV show has gotten teeth-grindingly frustrating. Every season of The Pitt takes place across a single relentlessly intense day, but we experience it an hour at a time, week to week, for a period of three or four months — and just about every single one of those hours ends with a mind-blowing twist that you’ll have to wait seven days to see resolved.

Over the past seven years, Prime Video’s flagship show has been The Boys, a shockingly gruesome, shamelessly X-rated satire of the superhero genre. Homelander’s reign of terror has kept Amazon’s subscribers locked in since 2019. And now, after five seasons, The Boys has finally ended its run on Prime. While it was universally acclaimed on its initial release, the reception to The Boys has soured over the past couple of seasons, as the focus has shifted away from the main cast, the pacing has taken a nosedive, and the scale and spectacle have dropped off.

But a lot of those issues were tied to the painfully slow rollout of several short seasons across several long years. Now that The Boys is over, you can binge-watch every season back-to-back, and at least a few of those problems are solved.

The Boys Is A Different Experience If You Binge-Watch It

Binge-watching a whole series back-to-back is a very different experience than watching it week by week on its initial release, waiting months (sometimes years) between seasons. Some shows benefit from giving the audience a week to chew on each chapter as it unfolds. For denser, more layered, more thought-provoking shows like Breaking Bad or The White Lotus, these weekly releases let every episode gestate. Binge-watching a show like Chernobyl is akin to taking a nice, aged bottle of old wine and shotgunning the whole thing.

But some shows benefit more from a binge-watching experience than a week-to-week rollout. Better Call Saul’s first three seasons were very slow-paced and uneventful, so a lot of people gave up in those early seasons, but there’s a subtlety to the writing that shines through more on a back-to-back binge-watch.

Action-driven shows like The Boys work better in a binging format, because the viewers are just waiting to see the big payoffs — Billy Butcher facing Homelander, Ryan’s powers manifesting, Starlight leading a revolution against fascistic government forces — and when you only get one episode a week, it can be frustrating when the writers take 10 minutes for self-effacing celebrities to play poker, or for a dog to daydream about a dom/sub relationship with the most powerful supe on Earth. But you can appreciate those side quests and subplots more when you can just roll into the next episode.

The Boys had some missteps along the way, but it got all its big calls right in the series finale. That final episode provided all the grisly, gruesome payoffs we’d been waiting for since the beginning, and now that the whole show is available to stream on Prime Video, new viewers won’t have to wait seven interminable years to get there. And not only that, long-time fans can go back and rewatch The Boys to look for foreshadowing they missed the first time around.