Who Needs Batman When We Have The Penguin?
Backhanded as it may be, it’s a compliment to the new crime drama The Penguin (premiering on HBO on September 19) that it barely feels like a franchise offshoot. The series is a spin-off of Matt Reeves’s 2022 film The Batman, yet another reimagining of Gotham City and its various heroes and villains. But save for a few references here and there, The Penguin—from creator Lauren LeFranc—mostly plays as its own thing entirely, a chewy and gratifying underworld saga with a half-righteous politics at its heart.
The titular character is not an umbrella wielding, whimsically rotund dandy named Oswald Cobblepot, as he has long been in the Batman world. He is now Oz Cobb, a shambling golem of a man, coarse and ruthless as he tries to claw his way to the top of Gotham’s criminal hierarchy. He is played, as he was in The Batman, by a heavily made-up Colin Farrell, a mighty act of physical transformation complemented by Farrell’s more analog shifts in voice and bearing. It’s a big, engaging performance, mesmerizing in both its broad gestures and its careful detail.
Oz is probably a sociopath, yet he is capable of old-school neighborhood charm. He’ll rough up a politician and then help him back out of a tight parking spot. He’ll come very close to killing a meddlesome street kid, Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), but at the last minute decide instead to take him under his wing, acting as if the suddenly vanished mortal threat was really no big deal at all. Time and again, we see his remorseless villainy pasted over with regular-guy affability, either a calculating strategy or representative of a genuine conflict between morality and a howling void.
To further complicate the portraiture, there is the matter of Oz’s mother, Francis (the great Deirdre O’Connell), a senile old battleax to whom Oz is intensely devoted. She may be the last thing truly tethering Oz to the realm of decency, though their relationship is anything but pleasant—as is thoroughly, perhaps exhaustively explicated as The Penguin’s wears on.
The series is a tangle of plots. At first it seems that Victor’s protege narrative will occupy center stage, but then he fades into the background so Oz can tend to his mommy issues. And so a formidable antagonist can emerge: Sophia Falcone, the addled scion of a mob family newly released from Arkham Asylum, played with tic and purr by Cristin Milioti. She, like Oz, is a baddie of complex emotional shading. Sophia has been grievously wronged in her life, but has chosen to process all that pain by doubling down on her family’s wickedness.
Sophia and Oz are vying for control in a Gotham ravaged by the events of The Batman. The climactic floods of that film have destroyed a downtrodden neighborhood, and a drug war is being fought on multiple fronts. There is opportunity in that bedlam, which Oz hopes to exploit. He and Sophia both adopt a populist platform in trying to rally gangs to their cause. The Penguin imagines a sort of proletariat of the criminal class, rising up to reclaim their autonomy from the syndicate oligarchs. It’s a nifty trick, a rousing allusion to real-world debate couched in gangster pulp.
The Penguin is a clever show, shrewdly balancing gritty violence with melodrama, social commentary with wry humor. Its failings lie in its hungry ambition to tell too many stories at once. Characters either get lost in that narrative thicket, or are forced to change motivational course on a dime. One craves a more solid, concentrated arc for the season, one that would make the finale’s grim payoff that much more satisfying. A lot of plot is burned through in eight episodes; one wonders where the show could possibly go next, should Farrell agree to go on the arduous prosthetic journey for another tour of duty.
While that is no doubt an ordeal, one hopes Farrell will agree to go through it all over again. He gives an endlessly compelling performance, well matched by his co-stars—particularly O’Connell, Milioti, and an underused Carmen Ejogo as Oz’s sorta girlfriend. They all richly inhabit the show’s well-articulated version of Gotham, a morass of tribes and cultures scrambling to survive amid the entropy of all things.
The series almost certainly could have flourished on its own, unconnected from the I.P. lore that got it made in the first place. It doesn’t exhibit the same synergistic strain that bears down so heavily on the Marvel shows that have cluttered Disney+ in the last four years. Here is where D.C. finally finds its perhaps accidental advantage: its scattered mythology, its myriad stops and starts and reinventions, have created gaps through which creative thinking can sneak in. If The Penguin had to act tightly in service of a larger narrative, I doubt it would have as much snap and personality as it does. Which may be the Penguin’s dream realized: from chaos comes order.
