Nobody wants to yell at Warner Bros. Discovery more than I do. Just this year, CEO David Zaslav and his “slash and burn” regime have treated the animation community like dog poop, locked the Batgirl film in a vault (yet plan to release The Flash, despite everything going on with Ezra Miller), and then pulled dozens of shows from the company’s streaming platform, HBO Max, including the Kathryn Hahn vehicle Mrs. Fletcher, which… how dare you?

For these and other reasons—various annoying corporate machinations led to the unforgivable cancellation of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow!—it almost pains me to speak an undeniable truth. I am forced to admit that, among the conglomerate’s many solid (if not excellent) offerings, there is an array of DC Comics and DC–adjacent TV programs that have, especially of late, tended to outshine what the other IP mills are churning out.

Sweet Tooth, Doom Patrol, Legends, the recently wrapped Lucifer, The Sandman, Peacemaker, The Boys, Harley Quinn, and the third season of Pennyworth, which drops October 6, are generally quite different from each other in tone (and they all have their share of bumpy spots), but at the same time all are engaging, curious, and lively. Most share a healthy sense of irreverence—Legends, when it abandoned CW normality, ventured into a goofier territory, though HBO Max’s Doom Patrol sometimes overdoes it on the wackadoodle hijinks. The main thing is, these shows do not feel like they all rolled off the same production line. The best of them don’t have that faint whiff of algorithm; they feel personal, artisanal, and even impassioned in ways that Marvel and Lucasfilm’s small-screen fare—most of which is, yes, at least competent—frequently doesn’t.

We are in a cycle of the content wars that involves a huge array of dutiful brand extensions, but the current epidemic of mid content goes further than that. I’m tired of an endless parade of movies and TV programs that aim for no more than a B or B-minus, and only manage to scrape a C. Warner Bros. Discovery may be doing a lot wrong, but this year the company did manage to give us the subversive Peacemaker’s phenomenal opening sequence and not one but two superhero-infused orgies: an animated one on HBO Max’s Harley Quinn and a live-action lube-athon on Amazon’s The Boys (so nice to have variety).

Pennyworth is actually not all that out there; its most successful gambits are often aesthetic (an assessment that does not include the show’s cringe new subtitle: The Origin of Batman’s Butler. HBO Max, no!). One of many things I like about the drama is that it’s not so under-lit and drably colored that I can actually see what’s on the screen. Yes, that was a subtweet of a recent (acceptable) Batfilm.

Pennyworth, which stars Jack Bannon as the title character, takes place in an alt-history version of Swinging London, and the first two seasons are also timely in that they chronicle former special forces soldier Alfred Pennyworth and his pals trying to take down a fascist political movement. In the main—and I say this as a compliment—Pennyworth comes off as a more serialized version of ye olde USA Network–style fare, where a charismatic guy has cool adventures, utters terse and ironic remarks, and usually gets the girl. It features an array of excellent actors like Anna Chancellor, James Purefoy, Polly Walker, Emma Corrin, and Ramon Tikaram as Alfred’s allies and enemies, plus Paloma Faith as a homicidal Northerner in a beehive hairdo. And Bannon himself perfectly fills the role of charming rogue with a quiet sense of honor.

In the new season, which is diverting but occasionally lacks the snap and batshit twists of previous outings, I learned more than I wanted to know about Patrick Wayne, Thomas Wayne’s father (the origins of Batman’s plutocratic grandpa?). Although Ben Aldridge and Emma Paetz—who play Thomas and Martha Wayne—are quite good, they are a bit over-emphasized this season; the Bat-parents have always worked best as a side salad. (That said, secret agent Martha Wayne is a very appealing badass. I’d pick Batmom over Batdad in any fight). But no bother, as Alfred might say: Despite some characters and storylines not being fully fleshed out, the new season offers ample opportunities for Bannon, Ryan Fletcher (as Alfred’s exasperated Scottish pal, Dave Boy), Simon Manyonda (a dryly memorable Lucius Fox), and Dorothy Atkinson (Alfred’s plucky and resilient mother, Mary) to excel at light comedy while pursuing adventure, espionage, pub-going, and romance.

Speaking of Batman’s parents (and when aren’t we?), they turn up on another series in one of the most brilliant television episodes of the year, “Batman Begins Forever,” which may also be the finest episode of HBO Max’s outstanding Harley Quinn. In this animated saga, which has Abbott Elementary showrunners Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern on its core creative team, Harley Quinn started out as the girlfriend of the cruel and preening Joker. Without giving away too much, everyone—including the Joker—has changed over the show’s three seasons, and Harley’s journey from gaslit girlfriend to exuberant wild child who sometimes (but only sometimes) uses her words instead of her baseball bat has been a dirty, heartfelt, and sweet delight.

That’s in part because the show’s voice cast is a murderers’ row of phenomenal talent: It includes James Adomian as Bane, Gotham’s extremely frustrated and hilariously awkward large adult son (I love him so much); Kaley Cuoco as Harley; Lake Bell as Poison Ivy; Ron Funches as King Shark; and Diedrich Bader as a deadpan Batman/Bruce Wayne. In case you hadn’t heard of that last guy, he has, uh, a few emotional issues. In “Batman Begins Forever,” the overuse of the Waynes’ alley murders in popular culture is not just ironically commented upon, but also spun out in clever ways that supply an incisive and 22-minute excavation of what it means to meaningfully process trauma. Not to mention that it’s funny.

Schumacker and Halpern handed off showrunner duties for the show’s upcoming fourth season to ace writer-producer Sarah Peters while they work on Abbott and a Harley spinoff about a bar where Gotham’s caped crowd hangs out. (The theme song for this very Cheers premise should be “Where Everybody Knows You’re Bane.”) Until that show arrives, you could rewatch—or watch for the first time, there’s always time to right wrongs—the entertaining Peacemaker. It also smartly examines the kind of abusive patterns that can lead to the reinforcement of, or evolution away from, toxic masculinity, and boasts a versatile cast capable of the show’s many razor-sharp turns from comedy to action to well-earned personal growth. Also, I can’t get enough of my beautiful Eagly!

If there’s one good thing about the current wave of IP extensions, it’s the trend toward excavating the fact that impossibly long-lived beings with massive powers—everyone from Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s Galadriel to The Sandman’s Morpheus—are no better adjusted than the rest of us. Despite all the fodder the angsty Morpheus (a.k.a. Dream) gives the show’s writers on this front, I am still amazed Netflix’s lush new version of The Sandman works at all, given the rough spots in the iconic graphic novel’s opening chapters and how unfilmable this ambitious and multi-dimensional story of family, love, death, and redemption always seemed. But the Sandman TV team, which includes co-creator Neil Gaiman, has delivered something quite romantic, moodily goth, and swoonily melancholy. Even when things slow down (or verge on getting too gory), it’s worth sticking around for the cast (including standouts Tom Sturridge as Dream, Boyd Holbrook as The Corinthian, and Vivienne Acheampong as Lucienne), the perfect costumes, the searching vibe, and the ambitious visuals. And if we don’t get spinoffs with Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death, what are we even doing here?

No one will ever use the word “swoony” to describe The Boys, which has featured exploding body parts, extensive use of the C-word, and a penis that was (I think?) 20 yards long. I know what you’re thinking: That sounds exactly like the CW’s Arrow! I’m kidding, obviously.

The Boys, a swaggering examination of the seamy underbelly of commercial heroism, has a great love of extreme situations, but, as with The Sandman, a generous heart undergirds its digressions. It is frustrating at times: For a show dissecting how abusive personalities all too often thrive, it can revel in repetitious sociopathic scenarios too much, and I’m begging The Boys to think of something—anything—for Queen Maeve (the great Dominique McElligott) to do. Still, its core cast is superlative, and what may be most impressive is that it’s so bold, transgressively strange, and political in a time when those qualities are fairly rare in IP–driven ventures. If its critique of the superhero-industrial complex is not demented enough for you, there’s always Doom Patrol, which features everybody’s fave, Brendan Fraser (mostly in a voice role), as a Nascar driver turned sad cyborg.

Doom Patrol began, like Harley Quinn, as an offering on the now shuttered DC Universe streaming platform. That was subsumed into what became the larger Warner Bros. Discovery machine, which is now looking for a content czar like Marvel’s Kevin Feige to coordinate all DC–related storytelling. To no one’s surprise, as one story put it, “there are several reasons to wonder why anyone with a decent career would want the job.” Truth. But here is one piece of good news to whoever takes the gig: When it comes to DC–connected TV, they can probably leave it well enough alone, at least for now. The company’s small-screen weirdos may need a whole bunch of therapy, but they don’t need top-down corporate meddling. The superheroes are alright. Weird, but alright.