It’s Becoming Impossible to Look Away From ‘The Penguin’

Perhaps you’ve heard: The Penguin, HBO’s TV spinoff of The Batman, isn’t good or even great but, better yet, the greatest feat of prestige TV since—I don’t know—The Last of Us. The hype is perhaps hard to believe for a variety of reasons. For one, the once-great superhero craze of the past decade has reached a point of bloat and exasperation, with more misses than hits from both Warner Bros. and Disney. Five years ago, Todd Phillips’s Joker was a billion-dollar hit, the rare W for DC-affiliated movies post–Christopher Nolan, yet earlier this month, Warner Bros. released Phillips’s long-awaited sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, only for it to somehow flop as hard as Morbius and Madame Web. Matt Reeves’s The Batman, while not grossing more than a billion dollars, managed to be a respectable coup for Warner Bros. We’re eventually getting a sequel to that, too, but for now, we’ve been treated to an eight-episode miniseries about Oz Cobb, a triple-crossing mob fixer who claws his way to the top of the criminal underworld of Gotham. Robert Pattinson wouldn’t appear in this series, and Batman wouldn’t merit so much as a stray mention. Colin Farrell would have to carry this thing. It was a shaky proposition, all things considered.

But ultimately, I must agree with the raves: This show is indeed quite good—dare I say, better than it has any right to be. This is, for the record, a series in which Farrell grudgingly dons uncomfortable prosthetics and waddles from one treacherous parley to the next, bluntly wielding his thickest New York Italian accent in this relatively grounded drama about comic book mobsters distributing fictionalized narcotics in Not Manhattan. The Penguin is a spinoff of The Batman, yes, but it unfolds intelligibly enough for anyone who didn’t see the movie or else forgot what happened in it and, in any case, vaguely knows Penguin to be the tuxedoed guy with the umbrella, once played by Danny DeVito in a very different time. For hours at a time, you’re lulled into thinking you’re watching a perfectly normal crime drama only to be periodically reminded that these guys are slinging that futuristic, ophthalmic crack from Cowboy Bebop. But it works—Farrell and Cristin Milioti are turning in simply irresistible performances here.

The peculiar strengths of The Penguin are most potently encapsulated in Sunday’s episode, “Cent’Anni,” which—having screened the full season in advance—I would say is the strongest of the eight. This is an hour of backstory for the disillusioned mob daughter Sofia Falcone, previously portrayed as a ruthless girlboss by Crystal Reed in Fox’s Gotham and now strikingly played with a far more hectic, horrorcore demeanor by Milioti in The Penguin. Oz Cobb may be a villain, but he’s our man; Sofia is an ominous figure who by turns distrusts and embraces him. She’s also the lone woman of stature in an otherwise paternal organization, so she, like the outsider Oz, is fighting an uphill battle for influence. Oz and Sofia go way back; Oz was her driver and, in some informal sense, her adviser when she was younger. But the backstory for the bad blood between Oz and Sofia is only one part of “Cent’Anni.”

This episode is Sofia’s origin story. It begins with a tender glimpse into her privileged childhood. Young Sofia is sweet, but she’s also keen to succeed her father as the head of the Falcones (rather than her rudderless younger brother, Alberto), but she’s still rather naive to the viciousness the role requires. She probes, with some trepidation, into the sore subjects of her mother’s suicide many years earlier and her father’s recent dealings with prostitutes at his nightclub. Oz and Alberto both warn her—patronizingly, but wisely—to back off. She’s stumbling onto an awful truth: Carmine Falcone isn’t strictly a mob boss but also a serial killer who, indeed, killed the mother of his children. Once alerted by Oz to his daughter’s snooping, Carmine then shockingly frames Sofia for the murders, so she lands in Arkham Asylum. The tabloids, sensationalizing the murder method, now call her the Hangman. She’s deemed unfit to stand trial and thus left to languish under the hostile supervision of psychiatric doctors on the payroll of her father, who is perversely determined to ensure that his daughter is thoroughly and irreparably traumatized by the whole experience. This gauntlet of gaslighting and outright torture slowly but surely deforms Sofia into the wild-eyed bone-crusher we now know and love.

This transformation strikes at the crucial balance present in many of the more effective superhero dramas, between proudly being the whimsical stuff of comic books and being something a bit more real and universal. In Arkham, Sofia meets Magpie, who you’d probably guess, if you didn’t already know, is another lesser villain from the comics. She’s the sort of inky and twisted figure who stylishly represents so many clichés of Batman and Gotham and Arkham. She clings to Sofia and mocks her survival tips, essentially daring her to succumb to the injustice of her situation and become something like her and the other women in the ward—twitchy, bloodstained maniacs, all of them. She’s broken, ultimately, but she never quite becomes Magpie. Sofia is more muddled and interesting: twitchy, yes, as she develops an off-putting signature habit of smacking her lips, but otherwise grounded, supremely functional, and largely sympathetic. There are no saints in Gotham, after all, not even Batman.

Batman is the quintessential “street-level” superhero, a vigilante detective and back-alley brawler who, while being a wealthy scion, gets his hands dirty—in stark contrast to the loftier missions of Superman or Wonder Woman. Gotham is the ultimate urban underworld. With The Batman, Matt Reeves re-grounded a character who had otherwise become, in the hands of Zack Snyder and Ben Affleck, a woozy and unhinged meathead more invested in the supernatural side of things. For much of its running time, The Batman seems less determined to advance a plot than to establish a vibe—the sleazy ambiance and hedonism of Oz’s Iceberg Lounge. But, of course, The Batman, as a $200 million superhero blockbuster, had to culminate with the Riddler flooding Not Manhattan and launching an assault on Not Madison Square Garden in a cartoonishly overengineered plot to assassinate the mayor. Batman won’t appear in The Penguin, though, and Penguin, as portrayed by Farrell in The Batman, was a relatively normal character and not quite a fully fledged villain. Here is his chance to spread his stubby wings.

The Penguin is something admirably akin to Marvel’s suite of shows on Netflix—Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist—produced before Disney launched its own streaming service and retroactively made those shows and every other bit of the MCU exclusive to it. Daredevil was a mid-tier superhero who got a rather badly received theatrical adaptation in the way-back era of Evanescence, and the rest of these characters were nobodies. Their relative obscurity worked to their advantage, though, as these shows were more or less free to develop their own styles, strengths, and stakes with minimal regard for the tedious 20-year road-mapping of the larger MCU. These series were more substantial than the soapier stuff on the CW and Fox while being a lot less overdetermined and overproduced than the core MCU. Daredevil vs. Kingpin, Jessica Jones vs. Kilgrave: These were engrossing conflicts that elevated previously underrated characters to new acclaim.

Penguin isn’t in quite the same position as Jessica Jones—but Sofia is. Her dance with Oz feels new and thrilling and genuinely uncertain, which is no small feat in a franchise as old and overdone as Batman’s. The show’s exclusion of the Caped Crusader is furthermore beginning to feel like a wise choice; this series is betting big on itself, on its own stakes. The Penguin isn’t begging for a second season or even its own movie, though we, as viewers, inevitably will—and the studios will inevitably oblige.