"The Penguin," Season 1

Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone/Gigante; Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobb, a.k.a. the Penguin

I wouldn't have watched this show had it not been for all of the positive buzz surrounding it. "Fantastic acting! Great writing! A real surprise! You'd never know it was Colin Farrell!" critics said, meaning either that he disappeared so chameleonically into the role of Oswald Cobb that he was unrecognizable, or that the latex job done to make Farrell look utterly un-Farrell-like was so thorough that he was unrecognizable. As it turns out, it was both, and the latex costume that Farrell has to wear for the duration of the season is realistic enough to allow the actor a great deal of expressiveness. "The Penguin" is a 2024 series that is a spinoff of Matt Reeves's 2022 movie "The Batman," with Reeves involved as a writer and producer on the show. The series's actual showrunner, though, is Lauren LeFranc. The show stars Colin Farrell, Cristin Milioti, Clancy Brown, Rhenzy Feliz, Michael Zegen, Mark Strong, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Michael Kelly, Theo Rossi, Carmen Ejogo, and Deirdre O'Connell.

Told partly in flashback, the story begins just after the events of the movie "The Batman," with the Riddler now incarcerated, Gotham's sea wall destroyed, and poorer neighborhoods flooded and left without power or police patrols. Both random and organized crime have filled the vacuum, with different gang factions controlling different parts of Gotham City—the Triads, the old Irish gangs, and especially the Falcones and the mysteriously inter-ethnic Maronis (Iranian-Italian?). Oz Cobb (Farrell), not long after the death of Carmine Falcone (Strong, seen throughout the season in flashbacks), sneaks into the Iceberg Lounge to steal some crucial documents. He's caught by dissolute scion Alberto (Zegen) but manages to talk his way out of looking suspicious. Tensions seem to be lowering until Alberto begins insulting Oz, cruelly nicknamed the Penguin for his pronounced limp stemming from a severely deformed foot. Unable to tolerate the insults, Oz shoots Alberto dead, an event that becomes the impetus for the rest of the season's plot. Meanwhile, Alberto's sister Sofia Falcone (Milioti) is out of Arkham Asylum after a decade in a cell, having been committed there by her father Carmine when he suspected her of talking to the police about a string of dead women, the implication being that Carmine himself was the one who'd killed them. Sofia, suspected by the press of being the killer, earned the unjust nickname The Hangman. Now that she's out, she wants to see her brother Alberto who, despite his love of alcohol, drugs, and parties, truly cared for his sister and was the only one ever to visit her. Meanwhile, Oz needs help disposing of Alberto's body; when he surprises a group of young thugs trying to steal the rims off his car, Oz captures young Victor "Vic" Aguilar (Feliz) and makes the teen into his assistant.

The rest of Season 1 is about how Sofia, a smart cookie who has gone at least somewhat insane from being incarcerated in Arkham and from learning of her brother's recent murder, begins to suspect that Oz, who used to be her driver, is the one who killed Alberto. Oz, along with having to handle his new protégé Victor (on whom he begins to dote), has a dementia-afflicted mother (O'Connell) he's been trying to protect, and it turns out he's been playing the Falcones against their rivals the Maronis, headed by hulking patriarch Salvatore (Brown) and his wife Nadia (Aghdashloo). Oz is jockeying to become a new, prominent kingpin in Gotham with the help of a new drug called Bliss that is made with a special—and somewhat temperamental—mushroom. Vic has to deal with the internal conflict of being a basically good kid who is now deep in a life of crime that goes well beyond petty theft; Sofia, meanwhile, is plotting to do her own family in so she can take over the family business—something her father had promised her before he'd had her put into an asylum. Sofia figures out that Oz is a traitor, and he's no longer useful to the Maronis, either, so for him, life becomes a struggle to survive and to come out on top. How does the season end?

"The Penguin" proved to be a gripping series. Colin Farrell, long known as a lanky, skinny actor, does indeed disappear into the fat suit and facial latex he has to wear. I can't imagine how horrible it must be to be enclosed in such a stifling costume—the hours needed just to get into and out of the thing, plus the acting ability needed to pull off all of those dramatic scenes. Of course, I'd seen plenty of online critics' commentary before finally deciding to watch the series for myself, and I think the majority of the critics were right. "The Penguin" isn't a lamely woke attempt at a cash grab that panders to unpopular leftist viewpoints (the Mary Sue girl bosses, the unnecessary race swaps, disrespect for the canon so as to please "modern audiences," etc.): it's a different-yet-respectful take on a Batman villain that you thought you knew. Maybe you grew up, as I did, with Burgess Meredith's campy version of the Penguin from the old TV show, or maybe you best remember Danny DeVito's strange, gross, and not-quite-human interpretation of the character in 1992's "Batman Returns." This series's take on the character is in the spirit of every dark and gritty Scorsese movie about Mafia life, with all of the principals sporting nearly exaggerated goombah accents (words like turn, girl, and world become toin, goil, and woild) that evoke North Jersey or parts of old New York City. It's a fresh take, and something of a relief because the series stands in contrast to the piles of superhero-spinoff crap and Disney Star Wars mush that studios think "modern audiences" will like. The end of Season 1—which I already knew about thanks to all of those reviews I'd read—finishes on a gut-punching twist that almost makes me feel we don't need a second season. If the show's purpose was to be a character study, to establish who and what Oz Cobb was, it did so. And now, Cobb can feature as the main villain in the next The Batman movie. Colin Farrell acted his heart out, not in spite of the suit but at least in part because of it. My hat is off to Farrell's talent, and to the talent of the team who developed Oz Cobb's latex exterior.

So this is a more grounded, realistic Penguin. He's not comically quirky or a genetic mutant born with flippers and green blood: he's a sad, evil, put-upon, ambitious man who's finally getting a break in life. None of his relationships is founded on love although he does seem to care for his mother to a certain extent. We find out through flashbacks that Oz had had two brothers long ago, but during a game of "flashlight tag," he'd locked them both in a sewer during a heavy rain, letting them drown while Oz himself went home to watch movies with his mom, who slowly began to suspect that Oz was the reason her two other sons had gone missing. Oz's rapport with Vic feels almost warm until we find out something, at the end, about what Oz thinks of family relationships.

Everyone's acting is top-notch. Cristin Milioti, who goes from Sofia Falcone to Sofia Gigante as she comes into her own and separates herself from the Falcones, does a fine job of playing a woman who was sane when she went into Arkham but far less sane when she finally got out. Clancy Brown plays a combination of menacing and impotent in the role of Salvatore Maroni, whose family gets outmaneuvered at every turn. Shohreh Aghdashloo, as Salvatore's wife Nadia, whispers in Farsi to Salvatore when they're making deals; she comes to a rather grotesque end. And special kudos to Rhenzy Feliz as Vic Aguilar, Oz's teenaged right-hand man who deserves far better than he gets. All the actors do a great job of making us actually care about what's going on; it doesn't hurt that the script is laden with swearing (this is, after all, an HBO series), and that the visual language of the show is in line with Matt Reeves's movie version of Gotham. "The Penguin" is meant to look rough, dirty, and hopeless; Oz is just as much a product of this environment, a creature of it, as he is an agent within it.

That is, I think, one of the philosophical subtexts of the show, and it dovetails with the eternal question of the Batman's own psyche: how much of who one is is nature, and how much is nurture? The series, which barely mentions the Batman at all, makes the case that Oz is the result of greater forces around him, but he is, simultaneously, guilty of all of his sins. That being said, greater karmic/cosmic forces are at work: Oz isn't especially smart or clever; he's gifted with a low cunning and a survivor's instincts, but his rise to power is as much a result of circumstance, happenstance, and accident as it is of his proactivity and ambition. I get the feeling that Oz would agree with Frank Miller's line, from the old 1986 The Dark Knight Returns comic, that "the world only makes sense when you force it to." The difference is that, when the Batman had that thought, he sincerely meant it; if the Penguin thinks things are happening mostly because he's making them happen, he's sorely deluded.

The series's moody musical score comes courtesy of Mick Giacchino, son of Michael Giacchino (The Incredibles, Star Trek 2009, Doctor Strange, Rogue One, etc.). The equally moody cinematography comes courtesy of Darran Tiernan, David Franco, Jonathan Freeman, and Zoë White. Frankly, everybody in this crew put their love and heart into the show, giving me hope that, while Marvel might dominate at the movies, DC has a chance of dominating on the small screen. If DC Studios were to put out more work like "The Penguin," I would likely become an avid watcher. Some have joked that "The Penguin" is merely a gangster show that happens to be set in the DC universe; others have said the series is essentially DC's "The Sopranos." The show definitely leans heavily into all the Mafia tropes you've seen before, but it's got a compelling story and characters that make you care about them. "Modern audiences" really aren't that demanding: they just want a good story. But those audiences aren't stupid, either: give them a pile of crap, and they'll rebel. As long as "The Penguin" continues in its current spirit, the series ought to have legs. Of course, by the end of Season 1, 80% of the main characters are dead, so I guess the producers are going to have to capture lightning in a bottle with a constantly rotating cast and only a small handful of returning regulars. So be it.