Peacemaker Season 1 Review – John Cena's Absurdly Great DC Debut

The premise sounds like a bad idea. Take the most embarrassingly on-the-nose DC character — a man called Peacemaker who believes in peace so strongly he’ll kill anyone and everyone to get it — spin him off into an eight-episode HBO Max series, and hand the whole thing to James Gunn, who had just been fired and rehired by Marvel in the same week. On paper, this should be a disaster.

Instead, Peacemaker Season 1 is one of the smartest, funniest, most genuinely surprising things DC has produced. It is also extremely rude, extremely violent, and almost entirely unsuitable for family viewing. But within its lane, it is exceptional.

Ad

Peacemaker: Season 1 (Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

The complete first season with all 8 episodes of Gunn's unhinged DC debut. The physical release is how you get the best picture quality for that glorious opening sequence.

The opening credits sequence — John Cena, Danielle Brooks, Steve Agee, Jennifer Holland, and the rest of the cast dancing in full costume and tactical gear to Wig Wam’s “Do Ya Wanna Taste It” — is the show’s thesis statement before the show has started. This is a production that takes absolutely nothing seriously, except the things it actually takes seriously, which are, it turns out, quite a few things.

The Character: Why Peacemaker Works When He Shouldn’t

Christopher Smith is a deeply stupid man with a genuinely horrific childhood, a white supremacist father he can’t fully cut loose, and a sincere, operationally useless belief in peace as an abstract ideal. He is also, somehow, one of the most oddly sympathetic protagonists in superhero television.

Gunn’s writing does something clever here: Peacemaker is the vehicle for a show that’s genuinely interested in where this kind of man comes from. His toxic masculinity isn’t played for comedy and then forgotten — it’s the actual subject matter. The show’s arc is about Christopher Smith processing what his father made him, what ARGUS made him, and whether any of it is fixable. John Cena commits entirely to both sides of this — the buffoon and the broken man — and it works because neither version cancels the other out.

This is a superhero show where the lead character has real, addressed trauma. It’s also a show where he calls his eagle Eagly and the eagle is inexplicably devoted to him. Both things are true simultaneously.

The Ensemble: Six People Who Should Not Be a Team

The supporting cast is half the show’s value. Danielle Brooks as Leota Adebayo is the audience surrogate and the season’s moral spine — a woman dropped into increasingly absurd situations who keeps making reasonable decisions, which marks her as alien in this environment. Her relationship with Peacemaker is the emotional engine.

Jennifer Holland as Emilia Harcourt is the show’s straight woman in the best possible sense — dry, technically excellent, visibly exhausted — and gets a character arc that rewards patience. Steve Agee as John Economos provides the most relatable energy: a competent man in a series of incompetent situations who just wants everyone to stop blaming him for everything.

Freddie Stroma as Adrian Chase / Vigilante is a revelation. Vigilante is, if anything, more morally broken than Peacemaker but lacks the backstory to explain it — he simply finds killing people normal and cannot understand why others don’t share this view. He steals every scene he’s in.

Ad

The Suicide Squad (4K Ultra HD) (opens in a new tab)

Watch this before Season 1. It's where Peacemaker first appears, it's brilliant in its own right, and it sets up everything Gunn does next.

The Plot: Butterfly Season

The villain concept — alien “butterflies” that take over human bodies and operate from inside the heads of powerful people — is exactly as unhinged as it sounds, and the show leans into it without apology. This isn’t a show about geopolitics or corporate espionage. The threat is alien butterflies, and the team assembled to stop them is objectively the worst possible team for the job.

What this structure allows Gunn to do is give each episode its own absurdist set piece while the larger arc develops at pace. The show never drags. Each episode earns its runtime, escalates the chaos appropriately, and then deposits you somewhere you didn’t expect.

The finale delivers a genuine shocker in its last minutes — a sequence that is both maximally stupid and maximally effective, and which contains what may be the best Justice League cameo in DC history. No spoilers, but it earned an involuntary noise in this house.

The Tone: Dirty, Sharp, and Occasionally Moving

Gunn’s superpower is maintaining a coherent voice across wildly different registers in the same scene. Peacemaker can be objectively hilarious — the running gag about Economos’s fake beard, Vigilante’s complete absence of a moral compass, the choreographed opening — and then immediately genuinely sad, without either mode canceling the other out.

The show is not trying to be The Boys. Where The Boys uses superhero parody as a delivery system for political satire, Peacemaker is interested in its characters as specific broken people. It has something to say about fathers, about violence as inheritance, about the difference between being good and doing good. None of this is subtle. But it is real.

For the dad viewer: this show is about a man running from his father’s influence while also depending on it for his self-concept. You will not watch it and think “this is exactly my experience,” but you will think about it.

The Production: James Gunn Directing All Eight Episodes

It is worth noting that Gunn wrote and directed the entire season himself. This is rare in prestige television and explains the tonal consistency — the show has a single authorial voice across its whole run, which matters when the tone is this precise.

The visual language is cleaner than typical superhero fare. Gunn understands action choreography and uses it to express character: Peacemaker fights dirty and efficiently; Harcourt fights like someone who doesn’t want to be there but is very good at it. The production design gives Peacemaker’s home — a mess of 80s metal posters and white-trash chaos — the same loving attention as the action sequences.

The soundtrack is a running argument for hard rock: Wig Wam, Hanoi Rocks, Steel Panther, and a dozen others run through the show’s veins. This is not accidental taste; it’s characterisation.

Do I need to watch The Suicide Squad before Peacemaker Season 1?

Technically no, but practically yes. Peacemaker first appears in The Suicide Squad (2021), and while Season 1 gives you enough backstory to follow along, the callbacks hit much harder if you’ve seen the film. It’s also a genuinely great film — James Gunn’s best superhero work before Peacemaker itself.

Is Peacemaker Season 1 suitable for kids?

Hard no. This is strictly adult content: constant strong language, graphic violence, explicit adult humor, and mature themes throughout. The opening dance sequence is technically family-friendly; nothing else is. 18+ and after the kids are in bed.

Is Peacemaker Season 1 worth watching before Season 2?

Absolutely essential. Season 2 is a direct continuation — characters, relationships, the emotional arc of Christopher Smith — all of it depends on Season 1. Starting at Season 2 is like walking into a film at the 90-minute mark.

What is the butterfly plot in Peacemaker?

The main threat is alien parasites called “butterflies” that take control of human bodies, operating from inside powerful people across society. It’s deliberately absurd. The show knows it’s absurd. It uses that absurdity to give the team a threat calibrated exactly to their particular kind of incompetence.

Does Peacemaker connect to the wider DC Universe?

Yes. The show is a direct spinoff of The Suicide Squad (2021), and it explicitly references the broader DC world. The finale contains a Justice League cameo that caught most viewers completely off guard. Season 2 then steps fully into James Gunn’s new DC Universe alongside Superman (2025).