Maybe you’ve heard: They’re making another Batman-without-Batman show.
I know, right? Another one.
As a concept, Batman-without-Batman is a big slobbery tennis ball, and the culture is the Golden Retriever who keeps dropping it in your lap and looking up at you expectantly. Who could blame you for shooing the mutt away, right? Enough is enough.
Consider: First there was Birds of Prey. Then there was Gotham. Then there was Titans. Then there was Batwoman. Then there was Gotham Knights. Somewhere in there, they made a whole, entire show about Batman’s butler. Before he became his butler.
There have been Batman without Batman movies, too. The ham-handed Joker, of course. And its upcoming sequel. Suicide Squad, and its sequel, or reboot, or whatever. The Birds of Prey one. That Batgirl one that got shelved.
And now they’re making The Penguin. Yeah: A whole show about the very C-listiest of C-list Batman villains. What’s next? Penny Plunderer: The Rock Opera?
Maybe you’ve heard about this latest entry in the weirdly burgeoning Everything But the Bat genre, and you said, “I’ma pass.” Perfectly understandable. Reasonable, even.
Then maybe you heard that this The Penguin show was tied into the latest Batman movie, directed by Matt Reeves. And maybe you liked that 2022 movie a bit, inasmuch as it felt like a clean break from what came before, and it had a solid take. Robert Pattinson was a more emo, wounded version of Batsy. The world of Gotham more rich and seedy. And now that you think of it, Colin Farrell’s choice to bury his toothsome face under pounds of latex and play that movie’s Penguin as a volatile mob underboss with a “dese-and-dose” Brooklyn accent thicker than bolognese – that was a big swing, and it was pretty funny.
I’m here to tell you – and no one is more surprised than me, I assure you – that if you skipped The Penguin, you’d be making a big mistake, and missing out on one of the best television series of the year.
“I’m squawkin’ here! I’m squawkin’ here!”
The Penguin is set in the immediate aftermath of 2022’s The Batman, which saw the Riddler flood Gotham City, killing thousands. Mob underboss Oswald Cobb (Colin Farrell) resolves to exploit the chaos and take over Gotham’s criminal underworld. To do so, he must play his own crime family, the Falcones, led by Alberto Falcone (Michael Zegen), against their rivals the Maronis, led by Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown) and Nadia Maroni (Shohreh Aghdashloo).
In this endeavor he is assisted, reluctantly at first, by young Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), a would-be criminal who lost his home and his family in the flood.
The arrival of Alberto’s sister Sofia Falcone complicates Oz’s rise to power – in a ruthlessly fun way. That’s because Sofia is played by the great Cristin Milioti, who brings raw emotion and dark humor to her portrayal of a woman who just spent 10 years in Arkham Asylum for the murder of several young sex workers.
And at the center of it all is Farrell, emoting the holy hell out of his every movement and line reading, so Oz emerges as a deeply wounded, doleful figure who just happens to delight in violence. He’s at once needy and impulsive, a combination of traits that places him in danger again and again, though he’s clever enough to talk his way out of it. Usually.
Farrell’s commitment to the bit will turn some viewers off, I suspect. He goes big, and his Oz is a creature of bluster and outsized, ever-shifting moods – never moreso than when he dotes on his mother, played with canny intelligence by the great Deirdre O’Connell. I loved their scenes together, as both actors bring a crackling intensity that made me temporarily forget I was watching Farrell through several layers of prosthetics. For some, however, Farrell’s histrionic take, that comically broad accent, and the fat suit will be too much – to them, he will come off like Ratso Rizzo with Tony Soprano’s BMI.
Woke up this morning/Got yourself a gunsel
Speaking of Big Tony: The surface similarities between The Sopranos and The Penguin are hard to ignore: Both depict rival crime families, betrayals, shifting allegiances, vendettas, and both revolve around a sociopathic mobster capable of horrible violence who’s also an open emotional wound. Like The Sopranos, The Penguin is a psychological drama dressed up in mob clothing: It delivers its pulpy, satisfying thrills alongside its more esoteric, intellectual pleasures.
But the similarities don’t end there: There was always something incisive about The Sopranos – for all its brutality and soapiness, it found humanity in the inhumane and soulfulness in even the most soulless act. Its characters were crude, but the way the show understood them, and presented them to us, was elegant.
The Penguin doesn’t reach the heights of The Sopranos, but it similarly seeks to examine the roots of violence, and it comes away with some pretty ugly answers. Compelling, but ugly.
The secret to that riveting quality is the series’ willingness – no, eagerness – to go beyond the comics to locate something new in an 83-year-old character originally created for children. In the very first scene of the first episode, we get a bracingly clear sense of who this Oswald Cobb is, as he reminisces with Zegen’s Alberto Falcone about a made guy from Oz’s old neighborhood who commanded respect. Farrell is perfectly calibrated, here, and lets us see how hungrily Oz pines to be loved and admired – and how quickly and lethally he reacts when that love and admiration is denied him.
Where shows like Gotham and Batwoman delighted in offering their audiences winking references to people, places and things in the Bat-canon, The Penguin gives the established lore a wide berth, preferring to build a world of its own. When familiar aspects do show up, as in a flashback episode depicting Sofia’s stint in Arkham Asylum, the show does good, hard work to make them fresh and – in the case of Arkham, anyway – harrowing. (Seriously: That episode is a tough sit.)
The cure for superhero fatigue?
There’s been a certain sameness to superhero fare, I’m sure you will agree. And a thinness.
Shows like The Boys and Invincible (and movies like Deadpool & Wolverine, for that matter), traffic in the kind of glib, nihilistic humor and grisly violence that always makes me feel like I’m hanging out with a 14-year-old self-styled edgelord who keeps giggling at how much he thinks he’s getting away with.
But the sunnier, more family-oriented superhero fare of the CW and Marvel – your The Flash, your Superman and Lois, your Stargirl, your Echo and She-Hulk and Secret Invasion and so, so many others – they’re hidebound by their format. Their comparatively straightforward plotting is meant to create content you can fold your laundry to. When characters exchange dialogue, that dialogue exists solely to convey the information required for the plot to move forward, not anything so esoteric as delineating character or revealing insights. That’s because these shows are beholden to network executives who place a premium on absolute clarity, on never leaving a viewer even momentarily unsure or confused or god forbid, challenged in any meaningful way. The worry is, amid a glut of streaming options, a confused viewer is a viewer that clicks away, to be lost forever.
(There’s a third category of superhero show that neatly avoids the sameness/thinness trap by being blithely, even exultantly weird. It’s a tiny one, in that it encompasses only three series – the crazypants Legion, which ran for three seasons on FX, the bananapants Doom Patrol, which ran for four seasons on DC Universe and then Max, and the crazytown The Umbrella Academy, which just dropped its fourth and final season on Netflix.)
The Penguin doesn’t slot neatly into any of these categories: it isn’t glib, it isn’t formulaic, and it isn’t particularly weird. What it is, however, is pretty great, because it concerns itself with digging deeper under the surface than previous superhero shows have bothered to do – and going harder.
It’s a series that allows individual moments to linger for their own sake. A shared look, or an exchange of dialogue, will be allowed to hang in the air for long seconds, doing absolutely nothing to move the plot forward, but doing absolutely everything to define the characters involved. As a result, our understanding of those characters deepens and complicates, moving us to invest more greatly in these people, and in this world.
(Plus, the first episode supplies us with the funniest, most deftly characterizing Dolly Parton needle-drop ever put to screen.)
But as the show barrels toward its satisfying if operatically tragic conclusion, certain rote, recognizable elements of the comic book Penguin begin to creep in – a top hat here, a cigarette holder there, etc. They’re not the kind of winking, elbow-to-the-ribs references that weighed down so many previous Batman-without-Batman shows, but they’re frustrating nonetheless. The Oswald Cobb you’ve been watching for eight episodes is a singular creation, with his own demons, his own motivations. Watching him even start to conform to the corporate-mandated style guide may be inevitable, but I don’t have to like it.
In the end, The Penguin is the tale of a thug who becomes a boss, and the sacrifices he all-too-willingly makes along the way. That it succeeds as thoroughly as it does may be surprising, given its provenance as yet another Batman-without-Batman nugget of Warner’s IP, but the creators’ refusal to coast on what has gone before, and their willingness to let Farrell and Milioti dig into their characters so we can all sit back and watch them work with what they’ve unearthed is what makes for greatly satisfying TV.
The Penguin may not represent the cure for superhero fatigue, but it delivers a powerful dose of medicine that can treat its symptoms.
Copyright 2024 NPR
