Between the Suicide Squad, the Justice League, the X-Men, the Defenders and—of course—the Avengers, you could be tempted to dismiss Amazon’s The Boys as just another superhero ensemble series in an already-saturated market. A word of advice: don’t.

The Boys might look familiar, but it’s something very different from the ordinary super-fare: a brutally violent, deeply cynical, razor-sharp satire of both superheroes and the fandom who supports them. It’s also the most realistic vision Hollywood has ever offered of what the world might actually look like if heroes roamed our streets.

Forget the PG-13 palatability of the MCU, where spectacular set pieces, careful cutaways and clever save-the-cat scenarios keep audiences focused on the action—and distracted from the massive, gruesome casualties happening somewhere off-screen. Intellectually, you know the Avengers have a hell of a body count, but it’s entirely out of sight, out of mind. (At least until it can be obliquely referenced as the motivation for an otherwise forgettable villain, or as the source of Iron Man’s PTSD.)

On The Boys, human bodies are the eggs you’ve gotta break to make an Omelet of Justice, and every heroic mission leaves behind a trail of collateral damage: ordinary citizens who end up paralyzed, dismembered, incinerated or liquefied by the superheroes who were supposed to save them. And for fans of the genre, it’s a cold, hard reality check about what the world would look like if the modern superhero myth became reality. The star-spangled man with a plan and an incorruptible moral center is a fairy tale; in real life, superheroes would be corrupt cash cows, beholden to sponsorship deals and corporate interests, the living super-embodiment of all the worst elements of celebrity, police and political culture rolled into one.

And we’d love them—until they squashed us like bugs.

The avatar for real-life fans in The Boys is a character named Hughie, played by Jack Quaid, whose girlfriend is accidentally killed by a steroid-slurping speedster named A-Train. (Her hands, which Hughie was holding at the moment of collision, are all that’s left of her.) In a conversation with PLAYBOY, Quaid explains that the realism of the series hit him from the first time he took a look at the script.

“When I first read the scene where my girlfriend dies, it just clicked,” he says. “I was like, Oh, that’s what happens! If superheroes really existed, if there was a Flash-type speedeester running around, something like that statistically would have to have happened at least once.”

Hughie is the emotional center of the show, one with a weighty responsibility: If you showed up to The Boys loving superheroes, his anguish will teach you to loathe them. He’s also the anchor that keeps the show grounded in a real sense of loss and grief, despite its absurdity.

“It was important for me to play it as real as possible, to get into the headspace of someone who just lost the love of their life in the blink of an eye,” Quaid says. “I wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like trauma for comedy. She does get killed in such a gruesome way that you can find dark humor in it because it is so insane. But Hughie is a character who’s born from trauma, and a lot of what he does comes from that singular moment.”

Also worth noting: A lot of what Hughie does is the kind of stuff you simply don’t do in a superhero series, and part of the genius of The Boys is in its violation of those taboos. Take the early, boundary-pushing scene in which Hughie murders the Seven’s invisible member, Translucent, by (there’s no polite way to say this) detonating a bomb that’s been shoved up his ass.

Quaid admits, “That was a challenge. To have your one of your more morally centered chracters blow somebody up with an ass-bomb in the second episode.”

It’s a watershed moment for Hughie, but also for any audience members who came to the show as superhero fans—and who now have to be OK with (if not enthusiastic about) watching one of them explode. It’s a testament to Quaid’s performance that the scene works so well, although it helps that Translucent in particular is the one to explode, for the same reasons that we naturally and rightly mistrust the weirdos who say they’d choose insivibility over flight as a superpower.

“He’s an invisible person, and the implications of that are so creepy. You can sympathize with him, but you can also want him dead,” Quaid says. “But I really wanted it to come almost as a surprise to Hughie, that he could even get to a place where he could do that. I wanted it to come off as a sort of reflex. Translucent says, ‘You can get back to your life,’ and Hughie is thinking, What life? I have nothing.”

The nihilism of The Boys reaches its first absurd peak here—why not detonate the ass-bomb? (Perhaps Chekhov’s Law applies here: If an ass-bomb appears in the first act of your show, it must be detonated by the third.) But it’s also a desperate step for Hughie, a frantic ploy to take back control from the Supes who hold all the cards, and it rings awfully true.

It’s not just the willingness to accurately depict the carnage of human bodies being blown to bits; the sense of powerlessness the human characters feel in the face of corporate-backed, indestructible, un-prosecutable superheroes is real, too. Comic book fans grew up on “with great power comes great responsibility,” but does it? Don’t we all know what actually happens when people have both enormous power and enormous leeway to abuse it in the name of justice?

As Quaid puts it, “Sometimes you just say ‘fuck it’ and run through people, knowing you’ll be protected.”

The Boys doesn’t shy away from driving this point home. Early on, a character explicitly compares the superheroes to cops, an analogy that takes the show from “realistic” to “too real.”

“I know our tagline is basically ‘fuck Supes,'” says Quaid, “but I think of it as more of a satire of the world we live in. In a lot of superhero media, it’s only truly altruistic people who get the powers. Or something about having powers makes you altruistic. I think our show says, ‘Well, that’s not always necessarily true.'”

This is the sneaky authenticity of The Boys: In examining the logical conclusions of a superpowered world, it exposes the existing horrors of the one we live in. In 2019, the people charged with protecting you may, indeed, also sometimes kill you, whether by mistake or through carelessness, with virtually no consequences. The only difference, for now, is that they don’t shoot lasers out of their eyes.