You can look at HBO’s new The Penguin series as a case of addition at work. It’s an expansion of Matt Reeves’ well-received 2022 The Batman film. It gives star Colin Farrell a larger opportunity to play the show’s criminal title character. And the prosthetics used to turn the handsome actor into the obese, scarred Penguin make him physically bigger.
You can also look at The Penguin as an exercise in subtraction. It’s a Batman show in which Batman never appears, and is barely even alluded to; Garfield Minus Garfield, but make it Gotham City. All that latex prevents Farrell from accessing his innate charisma. And it’s a Mob drama with a lot of carnage, but lacking a compelling or complex enough character at the center of all its mayhem.
The series was developed by Lauren LeFranc, a veteran of superhero and superhero-adjacent shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Chuck, and the Jumper spin-off Impulse. So it’s odd that The Penguin seems so averse to showing its comic book roots, if not downright embarrassed by them. Instead of Oswald Cobblepot, the Penguin’s surname is Cobb, and most people call him “Oz.” Despite this Oz Cobb igniting a gang war that seems to destroy half of Gotham, Batman never appears to intercede; there’s not even a newscast report about him being out of town to fight Ra’s al Ghul or someone like that. Penguin briefly gets to wear a variation on his trademark tuxedo and top hat in a late episode (no monocle or umbrella, though), but for the most part, he’s wearing what looks like leftover Donnie Brasco ensembles. A new character, Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), daughter of local kingpin Carmine, has a supervillain-style codename, as infamous serial killer The Hangman, but she wears loud dresses and coats rather than a traditional kind of costume.
To be fair, this is consistent with Sofia in the comics. But the near-total absence of other notable Bat-characters (save a D-list baddie who appears in one episode), or even for the most part people from The Batman, makes The Penguin feel like a brand extension without much interest in the brand. It’s a watered-down Boardwalk Empire type drama whose central figure happens to have a few traits in common with a famous character. At least when Reeves wanted to unofficially remake Se7en, he was willing to put Robert Pattinson into the Batsuit, driving the Batmobile, in order to do it.
The series picks up where the film left off. The poorer neighborhoods of Gotham are still reeling from the flooding unleashed by the Riddler’s bombs. And the death of Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong, appearing in flashbacks in place of the movie’s John Turturro) has created a power vacuum in the city’s criminal underworld that bad ol’ Oz Cobb intends to exploit.
What follows is a particularly vicious vicious cycle, where Oz — with the help of Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), a nervous teen whose family was wiped out by the floods — time and again plays two other sides of a conflict against one another, inevitably getting them both to trust him despite his reputation for being a duplicitous creep. As Sofia notes — at the first of many junctions where she could, and should, just kill Penguin but does not for… reasons — “You are so good at talking your way out of things, even at the cost of someone’s life.”
There can be fun to be had in the idea of a bad guy constantly getting over on people who should absolutely know better. (Most of the characters Michael Emerson plays, from The Practice to Lost to Evil, fit this description.) But aside from a few offbeat soundtrack choices (Oz is partial to Dolly Parton), and a performance we’ll get to in a moment, The Penguin doesn’t much care about fun. Oz is a dour, bitter, two-dimensional character whose perpetual ability to outmaneuver his competition grows frustrating because he’s not deep enough to be spending this much time on. A Penguin-centric film might still struggle to deal with the fact that the stunt of Farrell’s transformation — which, in both acting and makeup, is very convincing — isn’t worth the lack of magnetism or nuance he’s able to generate from under the makeup. But the plot mechanics wouldn’t feel nearly as labored at two hours rather than eight.
Those contortions also tend to get in the way of the work most of the other actors are doing. The great Clancy Brown (no stranger to comics adaptations) plays the Falcones’ chief rival, Sal Maroni, and is given potentially meaty material to play, particularly in the season’s second half. But anytime Brown seems on the verge of doing something of note with the character, Maroni has to make an inexplicable choice solely to keep the plot wheels churning.
The only performer who manages to mostly break through all the silliness is Milioti. No matter the genre or type of role — from playing the Mother herself on How I Met Your Mother to getting trapped in a Star Trek nightmare on Black Mirror — Milioti always brings full energy and a lot of spice to each series lucky enough to have her. In a show that can otherwise be oppressively glum, Milioti is clearly enjoying herself as the outsized Sofia, even as we gradually find out that she’s a lot more complicated, and tragic, than she appears at first. She’s terrific, and winds up outshining Farrell in the way that so many big-screen Batmen have been upstaged by the villains in their respective movies. As often happens, it’s an unfair division of labor — Farrell has to drive the story, while Milioti mostly gets to chew the scenery — not helped by how off-putting and single-minded this take on the Penguin is.
The very end of the season brings with it some shameless fanboy pandering that implies any future Penguin adventures might be more connected to the larger Batman mythos. But teases of other seasons and movies don’t do much if the current story isn’t exciting in and of itself.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with shifting an iconic character from one genre or setting into another. The Batman is, again, a serial killer story whose hero just happens to dress like a bat. DC has had a whole line of comics that have transplanted Batman and/or his Justice League allies into Victorian London, the Wild West, the mid-century Soviet Union, and more. But if The Penguin just wants to use the former Oswald Cobblepot to tell a traditional Mob war story, it needs to tell a much more interesting version of one, with a more compelling protagonist, than what we get here. The Penguin’s umbrella provides cover not only from rain, but from expectations that tossing aside what people know and like best about the character will be worth the bother.
The first episode of The Penguin premieres on HBO and Max on September 19, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all eight episodes.
From Rolling Stone US
