Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti are a hoot in The Batman spin-off series on HBO that knows how to craft mood and scenes. It’s more often than stellar.
Akhil Arora, a Film Critics Guild member and a Rotten Tomatoes-certified TV critic, who has watched all eight episodes of The Penguin. He has been reviewing movies and TV series since 2015 and has written for NDTV and SlashFilm.
The Penguin—premiering September 19 on HBO and Max—arrives amidst a shifting mood in a space that’s been overdone. It’s another small-screen extension of a superhero movie. Who asked for it? This kind of blatant intellectual property exploitation, solely greenlit to boost a streaming service devoid of an identity, that expands the lives of minor Gotham characters and crime families. Comic book storytelling has already taken over everything. And, what, it’s on HBO too now? (The Penguin was greenlit as a Max original in 2022, but in July, the executives pivoted and stuck the HBO sticker on it.) Isn’t anything sacred anymore? Here’s the good news: infused with the energy of an all-time HBO hit, The Sopranos, the new DC spin-off miniseries is worthy of the HBO branding.
Milioti and Farrell are exceptional in the new DC HBO series
The two biggest weapons of The Penguin are its two leads, Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti. Farrell, who reprises his role as mid-level mobster Oswald “Oz” Cobb from The Batman, is back under half a dozen layers of prosthetics that render him unrecognisable and require him to walk with a limp. He disappears completely into the character—from his mannerisms to how he modulates his voice—that you forget this disfigured heavyset gangster is being played by one of Hollywood’s sexiest actors.
Milioti, cast as the daughter of crime boss Carmine Falcone who was killed in The Batman, is absolutely terrific and terrifying as Sofia Falcone. She embodies every facet of her character’s past so wonderfully that she instantly comes across as a psychotic killer. Even though you haven’t seen Sofia do any of the things she is said to have done, you can believe she did them—and more. Milioti is genuinely scary. The Penguin affords her room to take the reins, be it ripping into other characters or digging into the hatred fuel that stems from her torturous backstory. In fact, Milioti is so good that she threatens to make it The Sofia Falcone Show.
The Penguin understands the power of conversation on TV
The other thing The Penguin has going for it is that it understands the power of conversation on TV. All you need to deliver a good, engaging scene is two people in it and a push-and-pull dynamic between them. It could be one character admitting to another that they failed them. Merely sketching out how they envision their future and getting mocked for a lack of ambition. Or it could be someone mythologising their trauma to sell a product. Give the audience some vulnerability and you’ve got them hooked. The Penguin’s makers—led by showrunner Lauren LeFranc and handpicked by The Batman director Matt Reeves who supervised the writing and the hiring of the directors—know how to build mood, craft a scene and hold your attention.
This is evident from the get-go. The camera holds and lets scenes breathe, the dialogue is authentic to the characters and their situation, and you never quite know where we might be headed. The Penguin succeeds in being unsettling. At times, it knows how to be really funny. Thanks to a title character who loves sharing what’s on his mind and who doesn’t have the social skills of polite society, the DC HBO miniseries can mine humour from violent and uncomfortable situations.
Mostly though, it plays it straight, which is great because it excels as a criminal underworld saga where everyone’s trying to outwit the other. That said, The Penguin isn’t afraid to be inventive and change it up. Two episodes—one more than the other—chart new territory and show that The Penguin can succeed outside of its core approach. One of them is part psychological horror (yes, it’s set in Arkham and it’s nightmarish) while the other delves into a grim family past that reveals how possessiveness can be deadly. The only knock I’ve against the show is that the first half is stronger than the second. (Strangely, that’s an issue it shares with its parent property, The Batman.) As it gets deep into its narrative, The Penguin loses some of the elements that made it so fun. But that’s also a byproduct of the title character’s arc.
The Penguin opens a week after The Batman
Set a week after the events of The Batman in November 2022, The Penguin opens in Gotham with a power vacuum in the criminal underworld after the assassination of Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). His son, Alberto (Michael Zegen), is expected to take his place alongside his sister, Sofia (Milioti), who’s released from Arkham State Hospital after a decade. But it may not be as straightforward, what with their uncle, Luca Falcone (Scott Cohen), having his own designs. Caught amidst family squabbles and following a rash move of his own, Oz soon learns that he’s about to lose the drug business he managed for Carmine. In a desperate bid, Oz quickly backpedals and concocts a new plan that involves Falcone’s erstwhile chief rival, Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown), who’s holed up in Blackgate Prison.
Oz must also deal with the lingering eyes of Sofia who starts to take a larger interest in him. But the Falcone princess has problems of her own to deal with. Thanks to her Arkham past, people don’t trust Sofia, and her uncle all but tells her to leave the family business. For someone who’s spent 10 years out in the cold, it’s an insult. The flashback episode—which charts her life from being a trauma-stricken child to a coddled daughter of a mobster—adds vital context and understanding to what Sofia has endured and why she’s determined to stay. It also tells us why Sofia cannot stand Oz or anyone in her family save for Alberto. Pushed into a desperate corner thanks to Luca, Sofia opts for an unlikely alliance, one that sends her on an eerily poetic journey.
The Penguin’s Oz isn’t a mob boss, he’s mama’s little boy
The Penguin offers a fascinating character study with both. This Oz isn’t the mob boss DC fans might think know him as. He’s an underling in a crime family and he’s been satisfied at his rung because he’s too scared to think big. Here is a guy who’s ready to run from problematic situations that are too intense for him.
When we meet him in The Penguin, Oz drives around in a flashy purple Maserati—sorry, plum, as Oz would say—because that’s the kind of man he is. He’s an odd fella who makes meaningless small talk about car air fresheners and not having enough pickles in his burger. He’s a chatterbox. He overshares when he’s nervous then claims he’s just messing with the other guy. Farrell does a great job at leaning into Oz’s crackpot nature.
Carmine’s death and the early events of The Penguin put him in a place he hadn’t been before. He’s got the opportunity of a lifetime to grab the reins but he’s too scared to even try. Oz might look positively menacing but inside he’s sort of a dimwit manager who’s succeeded as a soldier. He doesn’t have it in him to climb the ladder and be the boss.
All he wants is to provide for his mentally ill mother, Francis Cobb (Deirdre O’Connell), who brings out a completely different side to him. Their relationship—which adds a richly imagined dimension to The Penguin that’s unlike anything you would expect in a show about the rise of a mobster—is sweet but also tinged with repressed trauma. On the surface, she’s like the only person he really cares about. He’s tender and gentle around her, he’s attentive and listens, and he’s not trying to get his way like in every other conversation he has. Oz might be pushing 50 but he’s never really grown up—he’s still mama’s little boy. That also means Francis knows him better than anyone else. In the face of a daunting situation, she builds his courage up and tells him to grab the moment, for this is what he’s built his life towards.
Puts Gotham in a new light, sans Bruce Wayne’s white saviour lens
Oz would be happy just being the guy who helped people in his neighbourhood and made a name for himself. But when his small-time ambitions are mocked by a Falcone, he very quickly internalises that. Oz realises that the people he’s worked for so long don’t even see him. They walk right through him. Forget the neighbourhood—he wants Gotham to know that he’s just a poor kid from the East Side who survived, hustled, and built something. This is where The Penguin’s third main character comes in. Sandwiched between the two—Oz and Sofia—is Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz), a teen who lost everything and everyone he knew after the Riddler blew up the city wall and flooded the city in The Batman.
Through the eyes of someone like Victor, The Penguin can offer a look at the impoverished side of Gotham. Sans the white saviour lens of Bruce Wayne, who only steps into those areas when he’s hunting down a target or trying to stop a villain’s plan. When you don’t have that level of privilege, falling in with the bad crowd isn’t a decision or a choice, it’s the only move you might have. This is the dark underside of Gotham. Victor is one of the outcasts and the have-nots who must live by on scraps. Bruce Wayne’s life isn’t upended if he fails to stop the Riddler. But for those like Victor, this is the lived reality. They must bear the brunt of those who play with Gotham as a toy.
The Penguin is the best superhero TV series since Watchmen
While the Riddler might claim he’s going after the rich and corrupt like Carmine Falcone, he doesn’t even know the names of those who’ve suffered the most. That is The Penguin’s mission statement in part. It’s about the forgotten, the invisible, and the men behind the men. (The show’s penultimate twist delivers on this principle but it’s telegraphed—you’ll see it coming. But that’s also because it trains you to expect another twist in the tale.) At the same time, it’s also about broken people, people with skeletons, and people just trying to prove a point. The darkness of Gotham is pervasive. It lends itself to a show of this nature where the characters are all damaged. Scrounging amidst the chaos because they don’t have the luxury of being holed up in ivory towers.
But it’s not grimdark, like much of DC’s early running. The Penguin knows how to have fun. It knows how to build a moment and craft scenes. It knows how to deliver. And, of course, it helps that its leads—Farrell and Milioti—are on fire. Milioti is intoxicatingly good. The camera is drawn to her face, and you’re drawn to her. She gobbles the screen so that it’s impossible to look away. With Farrell, you forget you’re even watching him. That’s how good the transformation is. He’s giving everything to the character. It’s impossible to find him in it.
The only shame is that The Penguin is attached to another property. That’s a double-edged sword in that it both attracts viewers and repels them. It will attract DC fans and those who want more from The Batman’s universe. And it will repel those who haven’t watched the movie as they will have little desire to engage with it. Here’s what I’m going to say—The Penguin is so good when it’s good that it will make you want to engage with the world it inhabits. Part psychological introspection and character study, married to a twisted childhood and a dysfunctional family past, the DC superhero series—the best of its kind since Watchmen—is fully deserving of its home. It’s not TV, it’s HBO.
The Penguin premieres Thursday, September 19 on HBO and Max. A new episode drops weekly every Sunday starting September 29 until the season finale on November 10.
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What do you think?