Mainly because it reeks of writers thinking they are clever, but they’re not.

Homelander in The Boys comic was representative of many things, but he was not a literal stand-in for George W. Bush that was his TV adaptation seems to be for Donald J. Trump. Subtlety is not what this franchise is for, but in the source material I feel there was at least an attempt by Ennis to add a layer of abstraction over the concepts he was taking on.

Here, there is none of that. “Oh look, Homelander said a thing that Trump says. Look, he killed someone in broad daylight just like Trump said he could do! Hey look, Firecracker acts just like Marjorie Taylor Green! Aren’t we clever and talented for taking the latest thing in the news and writing it directly into show?”

There’s just a complete smugness to all of it that feels completely undeserved and betrays a certain lack of creativity that I find frustrating. The fact that they so obviously and painfully state these things outright makes me feel they have no respect or confidence in the audience to read between the lines. And if a show doesn’t respect the viewer, I see no reason to respect it in turn.