Chace Crawford Sparks The Boys Reunion With New Prime Video Series

Well, here’s one for fans of unlikely team-ups and dark, slightly off-kilter comedies: Chace Crawford and P.J. Byrne are heading back to Prime Video together. If you’re thinking it’s another hyperviolent superhero lark like The Boys, though, this one is veering way off in a new direction. The show is called We Were Once Men—and it’s already looking to have a distinctly oddball edge, with plenty of black humour and some heavy satire about what it means to be a man these days.

Familiar Faces, Very Different Dynamic

First, some background. Crawford and Byrne last shared screen time in The Boys, where they had one of the more delightfully hostile rivalries on TV: Crawford was The Deep, that deeply insecure aquatic bloke with gills, while Byrne played Adam Bourke, a filmmaker whose story arc ended (spoiler alert) pretty violently for all concerned in the last season. Now, though, they’re going full 180—playing siblings instead of enemies. Let’s see how that pans out.

This One’s All About Blokes in Trouble

So, what’s the setup? We Were Once Men is shaping up as a satirical look at the current ‘male identity in crisis’ circus, set at a thing called the Reclaim Retreat. Imagine a group of men—one might say, slightly desperate or grasping for purpose—signing up for an extreme self-help experience that claims it’ll sort them out, give them a new sense of meaning and all that. Predictably, nothing is going to go smoothly, and it sounds like the type of retreat where everyone comes back changed, but probably not in the way the glossy brochure promised.

Who’s Steering This Ship?

• Writer: Matt Berns (whose recent CV is basically The Boys and the prequel, Vought Rising)
• Executive Producer: Jennifer Salke (fresh from heading up Amazon MGM Studios, now attached to this)
• Main Cast: Chace Crawford (of Gossip Girl and The Boys notoriety, with Super Troopers 3 coming up next), P.J. Byrne (think The Wolf of Wall Street, Big Little Lies, Babylon, and a couple of intriguing films on the way—Coyote vs. Acme, I Play Rocky—plus a stint in the TV adaption of The Rainmaker).

Intriguing Details (and a Little TV Trivia)

The two actors actually first worked together years back in the 2017 horror-thriller Eloise—bit of a deep cut, that one—so The Boys wasn’t their first pairing after all. Still, the show that made Crawford a household name was Gossip Girl (pure soap, but fun to binge), and Byrne keeps cropping up as one of those ‘that guy’ actors in American films and telly. For this new outing, they’re stepping into sibling territory—presumably trading in the fists and fish tanks for sibling banter and group therapy.

Prime Video Keeping it Close to the Vest

Amazon hasn’t exactly been generous with the plot specifics yet. What we do know, according to the latest Deadline update, is that the show is all about skewering modern masculinity through a mix of snarky comedy and uncomfortable (probably very relatable) moments. The blokes at the centre of it are mostly in crisis, and by the sound of it, there’ll be no shortage of satirical swipes at today’s endless quest for male 'self-improvement'. If you like your comedy dark, odd, and just a shade self-aware, this is one to keep an eye on.

The series 'explores a group of men attending the radical Reclaim Retreat, a program promising to help participants rediscover purpose and transform their lives.' (Amazon description)