Critic Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.