The new Netflix series Boots has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics.
But it’s also received some very harsh criticism from a very high-profile source.
The series focuses on a closeted gay teenager from Louisiana who follows his best friend, Ray McAffey, into the United States Marine Corps.
“After impulsively joining the U.S. Marine Corps, a bullied teen finds new purpose and unexpected brotherhood with his motley team of fellow recruits,” reads the show’s official logline.
Based on the memoir The Pink Marine by Greg Cope White, which is set in 1979, Boots moves the main storyline to the 1990s — and it’s attracted the ire of top military brass in 2025.
The series hits streaming just days after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth delivered an unexpected speech in which he informed an audience of generals and admirals that “dudes with dresses” were not welcome in US combat forces.
He went on to explain that all new recruits must meet “male-level” fitness standards to face “life and death” situations.
“Standards must be uniform, gender-neutral, and high. If not, they’re not standards. They’re just suggestions. Suggestions that get our sons and daughters killed,” Hegseth said at the event.
While there are no questions about the main character’s physical fitness to serve in Boots, and he is not “gender neutral,” but Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson still lashed out at the show in a recent statement to Entertainment Weekly.
“Under President Trump and Secretary [Pete] Hegseth, the US military is getting back to restoring the warrior ethos. Our standards across the board are elite, uniform, and sex-neutral because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn’t care if you’re a man, a woman, gay, or straight,” said Wilson.
“We will not compromise our standards to satisfy an ideological agenda, unlike Netflix whose leadership consistently produces and feeds woke garbage to their audience and children.”
The Trump administration has been going on the attack against entertainers and media outlets whose views do not perfectly align with their own, but thus far, those attacks have had the opposite of the intended effect.
For example, Jimmy Kimmel enjoyed a massive ratings surge after he was briefly removed from ABC following public pressure from FCC Chair Brendan Carr.
And in its first week of release, Boots has proven to be a massive hit for Netflix. There’s no saying how much of that success is due to free publicity from the show’s critics.