
'The Boys' just dropped an unhinged video poking fun at 'The Bear,' 'The Last of Us,' 'House of the Dragon' and itself
"The Boys" season 5 is still filming and is tentatively projected for a 2026 release window.
But in the meantime, "The Boys" season 4 is campaigning for Emmy nominations, and it's doing it in a way that is as delightfully demented as the twisted superhero show itself.
Titled "Acting for Awards Season," this for your consideration (FYC) video is a parody of "Masterclass" that stars "award-winning" director Adam Bourke (P.J. Byrne), who directed the Vought Studios films "Dawn of the Seven" and 'Training A-Train.'
In the video, the (entirely fictional) director lays out his guide to dominating awards season and makes fun of several very real shows along the way. None of these shows are explicitly named, but you can pretty easily spot most of them.
First up? "Mare of Easttown," and its "Philadelphia accents," which get attacked at the 0:36 mark.
Then it's on to skewering "Bridgerton" and its prolific amount of promiscuous people, while possibly also going after "Shogun" and its use of seppuku.
Of course, "Game of Thrones" wasn't going to escape Bourke's razor wit. "Dragons. Cheesy as hell," the director declared, clearly taking aim at "House of the Dragon." "But banging your sister on a dragon? Jackpot!"
Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.
From there, we go into a brief musing on whether or not the stars of "The Bear" are qualified to speak on political issues like immigration before giving praise to "The Last of Us" season 1 for being "one-eighth gay."
This is, of course, a reference to the season 1 episode "Long Long Time," which is possibly the best episode of any show ever. If you've never seen it, or you don't believe me, go watch it on Max right now, then come back and tell me I'm wrong. You won't be able to because, like Bourke in this video, you'll be too busy choking back sobs, having just watched an absolute masterpiece.
Finally, "The Boys" took aim at itself, declaring you should "never do a superhero TV show." Granted, it then couldn't resist a parting shot at "Friday Night Lights," but it was still nice to see a moment of self-deprecating humor amongst the deluge of potshots at other acclaimed shows.
So, if you haven't become offended to the point of closing out of this article already, or if, like me, you found this unhinged parody to be hysterical, make sure to follow all our latest "The Boys" season 5 coverage to stay up to date with the show's final season.
If you haven't already seen the first four seasons, make sure to go check them out on Prime Video right now to make sure you're caught up before season 5 debuts next year.
Malcolm has been with Tom's Guide since 2022, and has been covering the latest in streaming shows and movies since 2023. He's not one to shy away from a hot take, including that "John Wick" is one of the four greatest films ever made.
Here's what he's been watching lately:
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Gizmodo
3 hours ago
- Gizmodo
The Long-Awaited ‘Mass Effect' Show Has a Showrunner Now
Prime Video's upcoming Mass Effect show is progressing slowly, but surely. On Friday, Deadline revealed the live-action series gained Doug Jung as its showrunner. Jung, who most may remember as the co-writer for 2016's Star Trek Beyond, recently ended a showrunner/executive producer stint for Apple TV+'s Chief of War. He'll be working alongside writer Dan Casey, and both will EP for the series alongside franchise producer Mike Gamble. As Deadline notes, this is a 'major step forward' in the show's development, which was first teased all the way back in 2021, then had its existence reaffirmed back in 2024. To date, Prime Video's kept mum on what exactly Casey's pitch was for the Mass Effect show. Among fans, the general thinking is that it'll just adapt the initial trilogy of Commander Shepard gathering allies to fight the Reapers. (This also seemed to be the plan when a movie seemed likely back in 2007 after the first game came out.) But shows like Castlevania and Prime Video's own Fallout have taken a different approach that tells an original story inside the worlds of those series. (Fallout in particular carries itself like a Fallout 5 we're getting to watch but not play.) Others, like Tomb Raider and Dragon Age, continued (or hoped to) the stories of the games they're based on. There's certainly different routes for the Mass Effect series to take, and we'll be interested to learn Jung and Casey's approach in due time.


Cosmopolitan
7 hours ago
- Cosmopolitan
‘Ginny & Georgia' Season 3 on Netflix Tackles Painful Periods
New episodes of Ginny & Georgia season 3 went online on Thursday and there is practically no adolescent issue that this mother-daughter dramedy hasn't covered. Losing your virginity? Check. Getting into a huge fight with your bestie? Yep. Getting drunk at a house party? Got that covered. Learning that your mom killed your stepdad? Also check. Okay, maybe that last one isn't so typical, but you get the idea. So it's no surprise that in season 3 of Ginny & Georgia, the Netflix hit is tackling that infamous coming-of-age milestone: periods. For the past two seasons, fans have watched high school sophomore Ginny and her core group of girlfriends, Max, Abby, and Norah try to survive Wellsbury High. In classic teen show fashion, every character has their own issues. Max is a girl-crazy drama queen (literally, she's an actor), Abby is struggling with body dysmorphia and bulimia, and now, in season 3, Norah's got period problems. Throughout the newest season, Norah is either on her period, waiting for it, or complaining about it. 'My period is so irregular, I can't even predict when it's going to happen,' she says in episode 6, right before getting all of her friends to take pregnancy tests with her. The very next episode, her pregnancy scare is forgotten, but her mysterious period ailments continue. 'My mom took me to the gyno, which was pointless because they just ask me a hundred different questions. And you don't know your family history when you're adopted.' (Yep, the show also has an adoption subplot.) The doctors ran tests, Norah explained, but still can't figure out what's going on. Well, I have a pretty good guess. I first got my period when I was 11, and for five years, when doctors asked me if my periods were heavy or irregular, I shrugged and said, 'No.' I didn't know any better. What I didn't tell my pediatrician was that I was bleeding through super tampons and maxi pads, staining my pajamas and sheets, and downing Advil to deal with my period cramps. Despite having two sisters and a whole gaggle of girlfriends, I truly thought that my period was normal because I had learned to live with it. I never thought to compare notes. Then one morning during a particularly heavy period, I took a step out of bed and a blood clot flew out of my underwear and onto the carpet. I had bled through the super plus tampon I was wearing and my overnight maxi pad. The next time my doctor asked me if my periods were heavy, I finally said, 'Yes.' Unlike Norah, I was overweight, so my doctor already suspected I had a hormonal issue and sent me to an endocrinologist straight away. A few doctors appointments and 8 to 10 vials worth of blood tests later, I was diagnosed with PCOS—Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. It's a hormone disorder believed to be hereditary that can cause, among other things, excess facial hair, heavy or irregular menstrual cycles, weight gain, and ovarian cysts. Some women don't have a lot of symptoms; others have all of the above. At the time, the criteria for PCOS was extremely vague, and the possible treatments were basically nonexistent. (In case you need a reminder: Women's health is underfunded, under-researched, and undervalued.) Effective medical treatments for PCOS are hard to come by. When I asked about next steps, my doctor shrugged their shoulders, gave me a prescription for birth control, and told me to lose weight (which, oh, by the way, is harder to do when you have PCOS). Over 15 years later, it seems not much has changed. At the end of the season, Norah's period mystery remains unsolved. She doesn't know why her periods are irregular or why she has bad cramps. And after years of just dealing with it, she seems resigned to just barreling through. I feel her pain. While I assume that she'll get a hard-fought diagnosis of either PCOS or endometriosis in season 4, it's also possible that she'll never get the answers she's looking for. Ask any woman with PCOS or endometriosis and they'll tell you it took years for them to even go to a doctor to discuss period pain, let alone be diagnosed. And that's partly due to the fact that many women just don't know that these conditions exist. In modern America, period pain is often dismissed, and uterus-related conversations are still taboo. Even in teen shows like Gilmore Girls or Gossip Girl, characters don't acknowledge their periods until there's a pregnancy scare plot. Young women like Norah might not learn about PCOS or endometriosis from their friends or their mothers or even their doctors—so I'm hoping that at least for some teens and tweens, Norah's storyline on Ginny & Georgia can fill in the gaps. And if a hormone disorder is the cause of her period problems, I hope she gets diagnosed faster than I did.


Forbes
7 hours ago
- Forbes
What The Streaming Wars Reveal about Bad Strategy
Rooftop party and viewing in Los Angeles. Created By Michelle Loret de Mola using Midjourney Max just pulled a classic Hollywood move: the reboot. Two years after Warner Bros. Discovery stripped away the iconic 'HBO' from its name, they've decided to bring it back. Max will now be called HBO Max…again. This will be the streaming service's fifth name change. They were HBO Go in 2008, then HBO Now in 2015, then HBO Max in 2020, then just Max in 2023, and now (hopefully, finally) back to HBO Max. On the face of it, this just seems like bad brand management. But there's a bigger lesson to be learned here. These changes were more than just rebrands: each new name came along with a fundamentally different business strategy. HBO succeeded when it relied on its own creativity. And then stumbled when it tried to copy competitors. For decades, HBO had a unique playbook. It focused on a combination of recently released movies, exclusive live events, and original series. While broadcast television depended on advertising, HBO used a subscription model. HBO played a leading role in what has been called 'television's second golden age.' It greenlit shows that shaped the culture, like The Sopranos, Sex and The City, The Wire, and Game of Thrones. At its core, HBO's playbook was all about the curation and production of prestige content. Of course, that was before the consultants came in. In June 2018, Time Warner, HBO's parent company, was acquired by AT&T for $85 billion. Shortly after completing the acquisition, John Stankey, the new CEO of WarnerMedia decided to change the playbook. To Stankey, HBO's tightly curated, time and resource-intensive model didn't seem scalable. He wanted a broader, more mass market platform with more content, more engagement, and more subscriber growth. In a town hall to HBO employees, Stankey emphasized, "We need hours a day. It's not hours a week, and it's not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people's hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes. I want more hours of engagement." Stankey believed substantially more content would increase viewer engagement, and that would provide more data, in turn enabling monetization through advertising and subscriptions. In short, HBO's new strategy would be to stop being HBO and start trying to be Netflix. And who wouldn't want to be Netflix? Netflix was the company that slayed Blockbuster, reinvented TV distribution, disrupted Hollywood, and rewrote the rules of what it meant to be a media company. Today, Netflix enjoys a half trillion dollar market cap that is double that of Disney and 22 times that of Warner Bros. Discovery. There was just one problem with that playbook: HBO isn't Netflix. What followed was seven years of wandering in the wilderness, as HBO struggled to emulate the Netflix model. Frustrated with the new strategy, HBO CEO Richard Plepler walked away in 2019. HBO's original content was folded into Warner Bros.' extensive library of content and relaunched as HBO Max. And while global subscriptions for HBO Max reached 69.4 million by October 2021, much of that growth came because we were all locked up at home during a pandemic. Unable to drive further growth from its acquisition, AT&T spun off WarnerMedia to create Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022. And things got even worse. Warner CEO David Zaslav doubled down on the Netflix playbook by dropping the HBO name altogether and flooding the platform with content from Discovery and Food Network. Suddenly, the platform that brought you The Wire was pumping out shows like Dr. Pimple Popper and My 600-lb Life. The end result of this copycat strategy was external confusion, internal demoralization, and financial underperformance. In recent months, Warner Bros. Discovery execs have begun to concede that they simply can't compete head-to-head with Netflix. As JB Perrette, the president of streaming, said in an interview, 'We started listening to consumers saying, 'Hey, we don't really want more content, we want something that is different, we want to end the death scroll with something that is better.'' It turns out no one wants a second-rate Netflix when they can already subscribe to the real thing. They want an alternative. They want HBO. Over the past year, Max has regained momentum by focusing more on quality, adult shows like The White Lotus and The Pitt instead of trying to provide a firehose of entertainment for everyone. The return to being called HBO Max is a long-overdue recognition that this is where its future lies. WarnerMedia made the same mistake with other properties, too. The company hired McKinsey to develop a growth playbook for CNN. Trying to emulate Disney+, they decided to launch CNN+. But guess what? Anderson Cooper isn't Iron Man. Wolf Blitzer isn't Obi Wan Kenobi. The service was dead in a month. According to Nielsen, Warner Bros. Discovery drew 1.5% of viewing time in March. This was less than Disney, Amazon, Paramount, Roku, and Tubi. Netflix dominated, with 8% of total viewership. The lessons from the streaming world apply to every industry: the minute you stop asking what makes you special and start copying others, you've already lost. You have to be creative. You have to come up with your own playbook for growth. It's a mistake to think you can succeed by copying the strategies of successful competitors. Trying to win by benchmarking high-performing peers feels safe. It has persuasive appeal when presented in a PowerPoint deck. A huge industry of consultants has grown up around it, adding to the illusion of safety. And it's an easy way to win short-term praise from the business press and investors. In reality, though, benchmarking is a fast track to mediocrity. Copying others only tells you what worked yesterday for someone else, when what leaders need to focus on is what will work for them tomorrow. Great companies aren't built on copycat playbooks — they succeed by doing something original based on their unique strengths. Even while others were trying to copy it, Netflix stayed true to its own unique playbook based on global content, viewer data, and rapid iteration. When the company took out $2 billion in debt in 2018 to help finance a surge in original content, skeptics questioned whether its strategy was sustainable. But it wasn't a gamble — it was an investment based on data. Unlike traditional studios, Netflix knew exactly what its viewers were watching, where, for how long, and when they dropped off. It used those insights to launch hit shows like Bridgerton, Squid Game, and Stranger Things. Netflix also localized content early, producing Korean hits for South Korea and Indian dramas for South Asia and the Middle East. By the end of 2024, the skeptics had been silenced — Netflix's subscriber numbers topped 300 million, more than double the total at the end of 2018. Netflix operates on the premise that it will win by doing things its own way. For its part, Disney could have fallen into the trap of trying to chase Netflix when it launched its Disney+ streaming service in 2019. But rather than flooding the zone with content, Disney realized that its winning playbook depended on developing content around signature franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar. These worlds are ultimately more than content — they're emotional ecosystems. And Disney knows how to turn emotions into revenue streams — through a flywheel of fan engagement, merchandise, theatrical releases, and theme park rides. For that reason, Disney doesn't define success solely through streaming metrics. It also pays close attention to loyalty, lifetime customer value, park attendance, and toy sales. Netflix and Disney+ succeeded by developing their own unique playbooks. HBO lost its way by trying to be something it wasn't. Influenced by consultants and consensus thinking, it was led into the sea of sameness, where companies go to die…or at least spend years treading water. To be sure, that doesn't mean you shouldn't watch and learn from competitors. But there's a big difference between stealing a page from someone else and trying to copy their whole playbook. The risk of doing that is threefold. First, it means you're playing to someone else's strengths, not your own. Second, it means you're focusing on what worked yesterday, not tomorrow. And third, you end up the same as everyone else, and sink into mediocrity. So if benchmarking isn't the answer, what is? The path to success lies in writing your own playbook, starting by answering five fundamental questions that define who you are and your vision for the future. HBO's latest reboot has been greeted with its fair share of sniggers and eye-rolls. But it shows that the company is waking up to what made it great in the first place. That's a good thing, giving it a shot at renewed success. The path forward for HBO isn't about going bigger or trying to please everyone. It's about going bolder, with fewer, better stories that shape the culture. In the end, the companies that come out on top aren't the ones chasing the crowd. They're the ones bold enough to say: This is who we are. This is what we believe. And this is how we win. No benchmarking required.