Peacemaker is a delight from start to finish. Nobody but John Cena could have captured this character's perfect blend of overblown machismo and heart the way he does, Gunn tells an engaging story with both humor and sincerity, the glam rock/hair metal soundtrack is just the right level of kitsch to work (They even play Steel Panther at one point!), and while I'm sure this element of the show will be controversial in certain geek circles, I loved how explicitly political it turned out to be. It never quite preaches or scolds, but the show makes a point of consistently pushing back on characters who make bigoted remarks or embody toxic behaviors, relentlessly skewers racists while showing them to be as pathetic as are they reprehensible, and openly embraces a progressive, wholesome vision of the future. We can undoubtedly thank the alt-right political commentators who tried to end Gunn's career back in 2018 for convincing him to make this show as political as he did, just as we can thank those same people for Gunn being able to work for DC at all. Good job, guys!
The show does have flaws. The CGI as a whole is pretty bad. A few effects look decent, but most of it looks very unconvincing, and unfortunately, the effect we see the most is Peacemaker's pet eagle. I love the eagle as a character, and his bond with Peacemaker is really nice, but he looks fake as hell every second he's on screen. A more serious issue is the fact that Gunn wrote every episode by himself, and by the end of the show, his writing style begins to drag. He's a great writer, but eight episodes of him and only him is simply too much. I've talked about this before, and I stand by it - there is no TV show in the world that benefits from having only one writer who writes every episode alone. Television simply is not a form of storytelling suited to auteurs. After hours and hours spent with one writer, you start to notice their repetitions. You start to notice their storytelling tics. You start to notice little flaws in their writing that might have been fixed if a fresh perspective had been allowed a pass at the script, or even a co-writer to push back on poor ideas and convince the main writer to do better. I'm convinced that premium channels and streaming services encourage the shows they order to be written by one person because it lets them market the supposed prestige of auteur theory to the media. "Look at this TV show! The pure, uncompromised artistic vision of one ambitious dreamer! This isn't a generic corporate product; it's a very personal statement and work of art!"
As far as Gunn goes, there's this one very distinctive joke format that he likes to use. Some characters are having a discussion, someone uses a certain phrase, aphorism, or joke, another character suddenly calls attention to what they just said, and then for the next thirty or forty seconds the original topic is essentially forgotten as the characters argue about the logic of the phrase that was just used, its hidden implications, or its literal meaning. Gunn can use this format once or twice in a two-hour movie and it's all good. But in this show, he uses it at least once an episode, and sometimes more. By the end of the season, I was rolling my eyes whenever I could see the setup rearing its head once again. I imagine it's even more annoying if you binge the show. And that's exactly the kind of thing that could have been avoided if Gunn had let other people write or even co-write a few of these episodes. There are other little tics and repetitions that would have been softened too, but that's easily the biggest thing that jumped out at me about his writing every episode.
Don't get me wrong - this show is still great, and I couldn't be happier about it getting another season. I just would really like to see at least one more writer come aboard and balance out some of Gunn's ideas next time.