I am not saying HBO’s The Penguin is derivative, but it is the second television show in less than six months in which Colin Farrell plays a character obsessed with the glamour of black-and-white old Hollywood films – particularly with clips from Gilda to evoke nostalgia for a time that our hero could not have experienced himself because of his youth, a poignant longing for a world of mysticism and morality that no longer exists.

Built into the recent spate of origin stories of classic TV and movie villains – Norman Bates, the Joker, half of Disney’s nefarious catalog – is an indictment of audiences’ lack of empathy.

These revisionist approaches to cult stories assume that, in an attempt to get audiences to root for characters traditionally considered “heroes,” they failed to take into account that even the worst characters find their awfulness in very human conditions: loneliness, trauma, treatable mental illness, hatred of Dalmatians.

It’s a subgenre that says, “Behind the story you know lies a story you never thought of,” a seeming revelation that opens up entirely new, unexplored avenues and saves us from having to relive the deaths of Bruce Wayne’s parents over and over again.

The Penguin is a spinoff of Matt Reeves’ The Batmanan already basic approach to the DC Comics story that introduced us to Farrell, completely unrecognizable under layers of prosthetics, as a nightclub owner and second-class gangster. Here’s how it is: You offer me the Penguin as a stunted, fish-swallowing freak with an ill-fitting tuxedo and skin so pale it’s practically see-through, and I’ll happily demand, “Tell me more.” Offer me a Penguin who is a burly, underestimated gangster whose insecurities are fed by an unhealthy attachment to a mother who coddles him with one hand and emasculates him with the other, and my first reaction will be, “Yeah, I’ve seen The Sopranos before.”

Creator Lauren LeFranc (Feed) has taken a new look at Oswald Cobb – the ‘-lepot’ must have been dropped at Ellis Island – not as a flamboyant and outsized figure requiring complicated explanations, but as a prestigious 2000s-style television anti-hero with whom one can identify not because he has qualities with which every viewer can identify, but because we have identified with characters like him on television for 25 years.

It is no wonder that this latest piece of Batman-without-Batman fabulism – see joker, Gothamseveral CW series and Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler – is least interesting when it focuses on the title character. Far more exciting is Sofia Falcone, played by Cristin Milioti in the show’s defining role.

The action continues after the events of The Batmanparticularly the destruction of Gotham’s seawall and the flooding of the city. Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong in flashbacks) is dead and Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown) is in prison, leaving a power vacuum in Gotham’s criminal underworld.

Alberto (Michael Zegen), Carmine’s son, may be ready for the ascendancy, but he’s an addict – “drops” are Gotham’s trendy drug of choice. For our story, Alberto also has too little respect for Oswald, who has made big promises to both his reticent mother (Deirdre O’Connell) and the lady of the night (Carmen Ejogo’s Eve) he loves. Everyone overlooks Oz, and some people derisively call him “the Penguin” because of his waddles due to a poorly treated clubfoot, but he finds a new fanatic in Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), an orphaned teenager from a poorer Gotham neighborhood left in ruins after the flood.

The only person who has any idea what Oswald might be capable of is Sofia, a serial killer also known as the Executioner, who has just been released from the overcrowded Arkham Asylum after a decade. Sofia and Oz, her former driver, have dark pasts, and things threaten to get even darker in the present as they engage in a game of thrones of sorts – especially since Robert Pattinson’s Batman is nowhere to be seen or mentioned.

Although Gotham is a bleak urban space all its own, not quite New York City but basically New York City, its overall universe casts a grim reflection on a 21st century America on the brink of class rebellion. The city’s working class is sick of being neglected and left in impotent chaos. The ethnic criminal enclaves are sick of living in the shadow of Falcone/Maroni. All of Gotham’s institutions are poisoned and in the pocket of the top one percent, which usually includes at least Bruce Wayne, but see above.

Although The Penguin refers to gangster classics such as The Godfather And White heatand although it reminded me at various points of half a dozen different HBO titles in the Sopranos But it reminded me just as often of wannabes in the prestige sector, like Ozarks or Low winter sun. Least of all you will probably compare it with The Batmanwhich is by design. There are fleeting franchise acknowledgments that don’t even really count as Easter eggs, a determined ethos that holds up… until it doesn’t.

The story is an accelerated collision, racing through three or four seasons of action in these eight episodes. Ultimately, it’s just different villains playing similar and repeatedly violent power games, in which alliances are formed but then dissolved too quickly for even the most fruitful character interactions to be enjoyable. Like far too many shows of this ilk, it treats us to cycles of colorful threats, sadistic torture, predictable betrayal and subsequent body disposal, delivered with professional polish but not enough creativity.

Perhaps the biggest question everyone will ask is The Penguin is whether Farrell’s prostheses function as a full meal, after the Amuse Beak from The Batman. In this respect The Penguin is truly a worthy triumph. The makeup effects designed by Mike Marino hold up well even in extended close-ups and in all but the brightest lighting conditions. Oz’s resemblance to Colin Farrell is only occasionally apparent, but this is not one of those prosthetics that renders the wearer unable to express emotion through the layers of rubber. The character is allowed to be awkward and angry and even, though perhaps not enough, funny and eccentric.

Farrell’s eyes are always visible and expressive, conveying traces of the wounded soul behind an otherwise bumbling and vicious monster. By playing with Tony winner O’Connell, who treats Ma Penguin like a character out of Eugene O’Neill, and Feliz, who offers elements of decency in a world where it is rare, Farrell reveals a somewhat gentler Penguin.

The “qualifier” for this triumph is that a tremendous amount of effort and even innovation went into making a professionally handsome movie star into a… character actor. I never got the feeling that this could have been a chance for someone like Eric Lange, Pruitt Taylor Vince or John Carroll Lynch, who would pass on the savings on prosthetics to David Zaslav. Instead, it’s an opportunity for Farrell to do an effective, if over-the-top, James Gandolfini cosplay, right down to certain moments where the accent similarities become uncanny.

Oz proves capable of carrying that story, just not in a fresh way. That’s why attention will likely turn to Milioti’s Sofia, a character whose presence carries less baggage from the comics. Sofia is treated more in that Cruella/Maleficent manner, as a woman whose dark path is set in motion by the assumptions and limitations of the patriarchy. Milioti struts around in the show’s best examples of costume design, making Sofia more believable as a tragic victim and embodiment of everything that’s wrong in Gotham than Oz, a character to pity and fear in equal measure. The head to head The dynamic between the two brings out Milioti and Farrell’s best work, but the exchanges will leave viewers yearning for climaxes far too soon.

The rushed nature of the plot means that many of the most prominent supporting players – Ejogo, Brown, Michael Kelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Theo Rossi – are under-recognized. The same is true of Gotham, really, with the locations and production design shining in some episodes but getting lost in the narrative muddle in others. The gritty and grimy visual style established in the first three chapters, directed by Craig Zobel and shot by Darran Tiernan, generally flattens as the season progresses.

The Penguin occupies a place in the middle of a subgenre that I can never completely exclude because every now and then there is a Motel 6-Bats or even a Perry Mason (HBO version), amid too many entries that are never necessary. But if the answer to the question “How did character X become what he is?” is “Well, have you seen…” then you haven’t thought far enough outside the box.