I rated The Suicide Squad as probably my favorite of the DC superhero films I’ve seen so if James Gunn is making a spin-off television show from it, I’m all onboard. Though this is a DC show, it features characters so obscure that their comic book origins barely matter. This gives Gunn a free hand in doing pretty much anything he wants with them and that’s key to why this series is so good. It has great character development, funny dialog, even if there’s a little too much of it at times, a good enough plot and surprisingly strong action scenes. I’d characterize this as an attempt to copy the MCU’s formula but with something close to an R-rated sensibility. As far as I’m concerned, the formula is a winning one.

Peacemaker or Christopher Smith is recovering from his injuries in a hospital after the events of the film. Surprised that he isn’t immediately brought back to prison, he makes his way back to his trailer home and recovers his pet eagle Eagley from his father Auggie. Auggie was once the white supremacist supervillain the White Dragon and the creator of the equipment Peacemaker uses. Christopher learns why he is out of prison when he is contacted by a new black ops team assembled by Amanda Waller and named Project Butterfly. Led by mercenary Clemson Murn, it consists of Emilia Harcourt and John Economos who also provided background support for the mission in The Suicide Squad plus a new agent Leota Adebayo who is secretly Waller’s daughter and spy. Christopher’s friend and sometime partner as a crimefighter before his imprisonment Vigilante tags along and becomes a de facto member of the team as well. The team keeps the true details of the mission secret from Christopher, only telling him that their first task is to assassinate a US senator who has been compromised in some way. When the killing starts, he sees for himself what they mean when a flying insect alien emerges from the brains of the compromised targets.

So there’s a plot involving a world-threatening conspiracy, graphic violence which doesn’t shy away from showing people being killed by headshots, dumb and yet amusing anyway fart jokes and references aplenty to the wider DC universe. But far and away the best reason to love this show are the rich interactions between its characters and the meaningful development they undergo. The very seed of Christopher’s growth here begins with the pivotal moment in The Suicide Squad when Peacemaker betrays the team and kills the leader Rick Flag as he blindly insists on following Waller’s orders. That death haunts him throughout this series as he realizes how hollow his justification of killing people in the name of peace has been all along. The character grows in so many more ways as well, resolving his deep-set issues with his racist father and what passes as a superhero-origin story for himself, coming to regard Adebayo as his BFF despite their very different backgrounds, learning to see Harcourt as more than just a woman he wants to have sex with and so on. The other characters grow and change too, with the overweight Economos who is ordinarily tech support behind a computer being surprisingly effective in the field and enjoying the camaraderie of being a brother-in-arms. An odd omission is Vigilante who begins and ends the series as an unrepentant sociopath, restrained only by the hero-worship he has for Peacemaker.

As neither Peacemaker nor Vigilante have superpowers, the show is relatively light on the actual superheroics. The Butterflies have enhanced strength but they can be killed by firearms like anyone else and I love how practical the team is about using a decent variety of conventional weapons against them. It’s annoying how despite the Butterflies supposedly have the memories of their human hosts, they always rush to attack like feral zombies at first and only later think to employ human weapons, but this lets the show pull of scenes of the team kicking ass against superior numbers of the enemy. The action choreography is among the best I’ve seen in any television show. Also notable is how heavily Gunn leans on rock music to punctuate episodes on a moment to moment basis. As I’d only recently talked about a director who doesn’t seem to have an ear for music, it stands out all the more starkly how much attention and care Gunn puts into the music and even has it form the basis of major elements of the story, including being part of the developing camaraderie of the team.

Gunn didn’t direct every episode in the show but he did write every single one of them and directed plenty himself. The whole project is clearly the vision of a single auteur given enough budget to play with and full creative freedom to do what he likes. It’s always very gratifying to see a filmmaker making good use of that opportunity to deliver a superlative show. As Gunn is given access to the more well-known characters who are part of the DC universe, it’s probably too much to ask that he is accorded this much freedom and is capable of this level of quality. But I am looking forward to see what he can do.