Peacemaker Review

The opening titles, in which the whole cast performs a deadpan synchronised dance routine to a Norwegian glam rock track, tell you the show intends to be ridiculous, and the surrounding episodes deliver on that with a butterfly invasion, an eagle called Eagly and jokes about the sexual habits of superheroes. What is unexpected is the other half. Robert Patrick plays Peacemaker's father as an unrepentant white supremacist who built his son's costume and his son's beliefs, and the series treats the process of unlearning that as slow, humiliating work rather than a moment of realisation.

John Cena is genuinely excellent, playing a man whose confidence is entirely performance, and Danielle Brooks and Freddie Stroma are superb in support. The plot is the weakest element. The alien conspiracy is a container rather than a story, the middle episodes lose momentum in a warehouse investigation, and the second season's multiverse turn trades some of the first year's focus for scale. The insults, though, are the best written in the genre.