Homelander’s America Is Already Here — The Boys Season 4 Hits Too Close to Home

What began as a wild superhero satire has evolved into one of television’s most eerily accurate mirrors to modern society. The Boys, Amazon Prime Video’s blood-soaked, boundary-pushing series, returns for Season 4 with more political bite than ever — and creator Eric Kripke says it wasn’t even supposed to go this way.

In a candid Emmys FYC conversation with Pod Save America host Jon Favreau, Eric Kripke confessed that the show was initially pitched as a Hollywood send-up. “It was going to be a satire of celebrity,” Kripke recalls.

“Then Trump got elected.” That shift in reality rerouted the show’s DNA. Homelander — the charming yet terrifying Superman parody — suddenly became the face of an authoritarian-tinged America. “He’s inherently fascist but has such stage presence,” Kripke explains. “We stumbled onto the perfect metaphor.”

As The Boys Season 4 unfolds, the show’s parallels with real-world politics have only sharpened. Eric Kripke notes that much of the new season was written before the 2024 election — and yet, some of its most extreme scenarios have “already come to pass.” Homelander declares martial law. Right-wing propaganda puppets indoctrinate children. Characters like Firecracker, inspired by real-life politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer, push the culture war to absurd extremes.

 

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But this isn’t just a dunk on the far-right. Eric Kripke insists the critique is systemic. “Both sides are doing it, but mostly that side,” he says. “They’re tearing apart the country to amass a little more money and power in another gold toilet.” His writing room, full of political news junkies, channels real fury into satirical plotlines — like Annie’s abortion arc, a direct response to Roe v. Wade being overturned.

Through all its gore and grotesquerie, The Boys stays grounded by its human characters. “The most subversive thing we could do,” Eric Kripke says, “is make people cry.” Every character arc is meticulously plotted, with weeks spent in writers’ rooms unpacking motivations and trauma — especially for complex villains like Homelander. “I don’t need you to sympathize with him,” Kripke clarifies, “but we should try to understand him.”

Season 4 ends with a nation under Homelander’s control — a development Eric Kripke says they once hoped would feel like a cautionary tale. “We had naïve hopes,” he admits. Now, with Season 5 confirmed as the series finale, he promises to go all in: “It’s time to blow the doors off.”

In a media landscape littered with cookie-cutter superheroes, The Boys dares to ask what happens when the most powerful among us stop pretending to care — and when the public cheers them on anyway. If reality keeps catching up with fiction, Season 5 might just feel like the evening news.