The Boys Presents: Diabolical

You may be tempted to watch this ambitious package of shorts in a single sitting, though these animated appetizers are worth savoring for how rich with creativity they are.

Whether you’re a fan of The Boys or not, you’ll enjoy the animated shorts in The Boys Presents: Diabolical, mainly because they tell good stories with funny character-driven gags.

Fans of “The Boys” will certainly be entertained by the easily bingeable series, but the most sterling episodes are the ones that abandon the genre completely and tell a fascinating, human-centered story — albeit with a gory, superhero twist.

While the standard isn’t uniform across all eight episodes, there are no calamitous “misses” in the mix. Each entry lands a couple of solid jokes and is successfully animated in its own distinct style.

Some of the shorts are absolutely fantastic, playing with the trappings of the show’s world to create funny or heartbreaking stories that stand on their own. Others? Well, let’s just say 12 minutes is often not enough time to tell a story.

It’s far from diabolical, but this is probably best enjoyed as an amuse-bouche before the main series eventually returns.

The show always looks phenomenal, but the storytelling in the mid-section of the season is just lackluster when compared to the creative plotting of the show itself and the best of these shorts. One could easily watch the first and seventh episodes and move on to reading the source material instead. If this animated experiment sags in the middle, it bounces back in the final trio of episodes.

This is a series of mostly good BOYS spinoffs. With the final episode being a great prequel to Homelander. While there are some misses this is overall a solid project.

Solid anthology show, a couple episodes were great but everything else just felt like different ideas with a "The Boys" coat of paint on top of them.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

An animated anthology spinoff of "The Boys" seems like a strange idea after watching that show: while there were a lot of characters, most had so many problems that they wouldn't even appear here, and the tone of that show was so bleak, that really the best they could do for a through-line was to have a world where Vought was the big Megacorp controlling most of it. You'd think they'd then have a bunch of stories about different characters and their efforts to take on the villainous Vought. Sure enough, this was even worse than I could have imagined. The first episode, directed by Seth Rogan and done in a Looney Tunes-style, is actually great, as it does the exact thing I mentioned might've worked for an anthology series. But it was clear as early as the second episode, which was a terrible, overly cynical, creatively starved, obnoxiously nihilistic, and aggressively mean-spirited episode directed by the creator of "Rick and Morty" (who is apparently one of those self-indulgent director types like Seth McFarlane who feels the need to gloat about creative control to an audience that naturally can't even interact with images on a screen, as evidenced by the beginning of his episode featuring a caption bragging about as much, amongst other problematic things), that things weren't going to go well. The vast majority of episodes just don't work, and focus on aspects of the world that just aren't nearly as interesting as what we got in the already-problematic main series. Honestly, some are so heavily based in spectacle (like the episode about a non-sensical cancer monster that is animated like an anime) that I don't think any really direction was given as to the setting. It feels like this show was just an excuse for some animation directors who may (or may not) even like the main show to add something to their portfolio. Even the episodes that actually use the characters from the show (like "Here's Your Pusher") were so shallow and steeply buried in the universe' cynical killing-for-the-sake-of-killing obsessed tone that they came off insulting wastes of time without much of a point.

Mostly just a series of uninspired knockoff episodes, which doubles down on the original's excessive violence, but contains zero of its soul. None of the featured new characters are likable, and the stories serve no purpose other than to spill guts, gore and profanities onto the screen. Compared to recent excellent animated shows like Invincible this is just utter garbage. The only mildly entertaining episode is the one with the Homelander, and even that one is painfully derivative compared to both the original series/comics and to deconstructionist superhero subgenre in general.