While the major battles between superheroes take place on the big screen with enormous budgets and billions in revenue as Marvel and DC slug it out, a smaller scale battle is taking place on television, and an unlikely champion has emerged.

Amazon Prime’s The Boys may have been sold as a “shocking” adult superhero series meant to satirize family-friendly JLA or Avengers outings, but I’m nearly through my second time watching it in as many weeks, and it continues to be a whole lot more than that. And yes, I’m willing to declare that The Boys is absolutely the best superhero show on television right now, even stacked up against much bigger names in the genre.

Let’s go through the current state of superhero TV at the moment.

The only other superhero shows that I would consider “prestige” like The Boys are the Netflix Marvel shows which are…all now dead, so that disqualifies them. While some were misses (Iron Fist), select seasons of Daredevil (1, 3), Jessica Jones (1) and The Punisher (1) were absolutely what I would consider the best superhero TV in history before this. And The Boys season 1 is certainly among them, but now that they’re all gone, it gets to be king of the hill.

The CW’s Arrowverse is in a strange spot right now. I have very much enjoyed many aspects of the Arrowverse, which, all things considered, is probably the most hours that exist in a single superhero universe, even adding up all the Marvel movies. But Arrow is ending and has not been good for a few years now. The Flash seems to have lost its magic with plotlines that seem stuck in time loops. Supergirl had a pretty decent last season, transparently political as it was, but the real star of the show is Legends of Tomorrow, which is comfortable being so totally insane and ridiculous that I would rank it as the second best superhero show on TV right now behind The Boys.

DC Universe is actually doing a great job producing superhero TV between its “edgy” offerings, Titans and Doom Patrol, which are both fantastic and would round out any top five list of the best comic book shows on TV right now. Even still, I think The Boys beats them, as good as they may be.

The rest are sort of…miscellaneous. Agents of SHIELD is always pretty good, but not as crazily impactful as it was in its earlier seasons. Cloak and Dagger and The Runaways are decent entries in teen-focused superhero shows, albeit nothing to write home about. I have not watched Syfy’s Krypton, nor have I heard anything about it, good or bad, which is its own sort of review.

The Boys is likely not going to have any real competition in prestige superhero TV until Disney+ arrives with its myriad collection of MCU-based shows with A-list actors. There are shows starring Loki, Hawkeye, Falcon, Winter Soldier, Vision and Scarlet Witch, with more to come no doubt. But if there’s one thing The Boys does, it’s that it shows that the names, the stars don’t really matter if you have a great concept and great writing, and it shines spectacularly in both those ways, performing magic with both completely unknown superheroes and relatively unknown actors.

One reason I like The Boys is because it’s actually about something. While it’s not the first superhero show to address corporate villainy, this is not Lexcorp taking over the world, and the marriage between corporate-managed superheroes and wider profit goals is extremely well-handled. There’s also a pretty shockingly sharp stab at Christianity in America, serving as essentially an arm of the corporation to further their ends, something I cannot imagine seeing in any Marvel or DC property.

I feel like every superhero TV series I see these days, prestige (Netflix) or otherwise (CW) is circling the same ancient questions about “should heroes kill??” while The Boys tries to get beyond these loops we find ourselves stuck in with plotlines in this genre, and actually ask genuinely interesting questions.

The Boys is a hundred percent the best superhero show on TV right now, and so far, my favorite series of 2019 in general. If you have any similar tastes to me in anything, give it a shot.