The Best Comedy Shows Of 2022

HBO Max's "Peacemaker" boasts the funniest and most charming opening credits sequence in decades, featuring the stone-faced cast delivering an elaborately choreographed dance routine in a neon purple room, all to the tune of a hair metal song, "Do You Wanna Taste It" by Wig Wam. It's all a taste of what's to come in the show proper. Most folks wouldn't necessarily expect a TV series spinoff of an ultra-violent superhero-adjacent movie starring a professional wrestler to be terribly clever or wildly funny. But then, like its title character, "Peacemaker" is its own thing — a genre-defying absurdist romp from "The Suicide Squad" and "Guardians of the Galaxy" writer-director James Gunn that really gets into the emotional core of what it would be like if superheroes and supervillains were real.

Busting out of a hospital after sustaining near-fatal injuries in "The Suicide Squad," the unhinged, all-American, toxically patriotic superhero Christopher Smith (John Cena), aka Peacemaker, joins up with a dark operation called Project Butterfly, charged with the absurd but important mission to stop a race of parasitic insects that take over human bodies. A superhero team-up plot commences, but unlike "The Avengers" or "Justice League," the characters (indirectly) call out the ridiculousness of such a situation at every turn.