As ambiguous as it may be, it is a compliment to the new crime drama The Penguin (premieres on HBO on September 19th) that it hardly feels like a franchise offshoot. The series is a spin-off of Matt Reeves2022 Movie The Batmananother reinterpretation of Gotham City and its various heroes and villains. But apart from a few references here and there, The Penguin—from the Creator Lauren LeFranc– plays out largely like a thing of its own, a thrilling and entertaining underworld saga with half-hearted politics at its centre.
The title character is no longer 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, rough and ruthless as he tries to make his way to the top of Gotham’s criminal hierarchy. He is played as he is in The Batmanby a heavily made-up Colin Farrella massive act of physical transformation, complemented by Farrell’s more analogous shifts in voice and posture. It’s a magnificent, captivating performance, mesmerizing for both its sweeping gestures and its meticulous attention to detail.
Oz is probably a sociopath, but he has the old neighborhood charm. He beats up a politician and then helps him get out of a tight parking spot. He comes close to killing a pushy street urchin, Victor (Rhenzy Happy), but decides at the last minute to take him under his wing, pretending that the deadly threat that suddenly disappeared is really no big deal. Time and again we see his ruthless villainy papered over with the kindness of a mere mortal, either as a calculated strategy or as an expression of a genuine conflict between morality and a howling void.
To make the portrait even more complicated, there is the matter of Oz’s mother Francis (the great Deirdre O’Connell), a senile old battle-axe to whom Oz is very devoted. She is perhaps the last thing that really binds Oz to the realm of respectability, although their relationship is anything but pleasant – as is explained in detail, perhaps exhaustively, as The PenguinIt’s easing off.
The series is a tangle of storylines. At first Victor’s protégé seems to be the center of attention, but then he takes a back seat so Oz can deal with his mother issues. And so a formidable antagonist can emerge: Sophia Falcone, the confused scion of a mafia family who has just been released from Arkham Asylum, played with tic and purr of Cristin Milioti. She is, like Oz, a villain with complex emotional facets. Sophia has been grievously wronged in her life, but she has chosen to deal with all that pain by amplifying the evilness of her family.
Sophia and Oz vie for control in a Gotham devastated by the events of The Batman. The dramatic floods in this film have devastated a run-down neighborhood, and a drug war is being waged on multiple fronts. In this chaos lies an opportunity that Oz hopes to seize. He and Sophia both run a populist platform to recruit gangs to their cause. The Penguin imagines a kind of criminal class proletariat rising up to reclaim its autonomy from the syndicate oligarchs. It’s a clever trick, a stirring allusion to real-world debates wrapped up in gangster pulp.
The Penguin is a clever show that deftly balances stark violence with melodrama, social commentary with dry humor. Its failure lies in its greedy ambition to tell too many stories at once. Characters either get lost in this narrative thicket or are forced to change their motivational course on the spot. One longs for a more solid, focused story arc for the season, which would make the grim denouement of the finale all the more satisfying. A lot of plot material is used up in eight episodes; one wonders what the show might go on next, should Farrell agree to embark on the arduous journey with prosthetics for another tour of duty.
While it is undoubtedly an ordeal, one can only hope that Farrell is willing to sit through it all again. He delivers an endlessly compelling performance that is a testament to his co-stars – particularly O’Connell, Milioti and an underemployed Carmen Ejogo as Oz’s girlfriend of sorts. They all populate the show’s well-articulated version of Gotham, a morass of tribes and cultures struggling to survive amid the entropy of all things.
The series almost certainly could have flourished independently of the IP lore that made it possible in the first place. It doesn’t have the same synergistic tension that weighs so heavily on the Marvel shows that have flooded Disney+ for the past four years. This is where DC finally finds its perhaps accidental advantage: Its scattered mythology, its countless breaks and redevelopments have created gaps through which creative thinking can creep in. If The Penguin If it had to act tightly in the service of a larger narrative, I doubt it would have as much grit and personality as it does. This could make the Penguin’s dream come true: order emerges from chaos.
