REVIEW HBO’s The Penguin obviously aims for Colin Farrell to do for the Penguin what Heath Ledger did for the Joker. The Penguin knows it isn’t original. Showrunner Lauren LeFranc’s eight-episode miniseries about the Gotham City villain’s rise - from mafia chauffeur to mob boss - joins a robust lineup of Batman spinoffs so expansive there’s even a prequel about Bruce Wayne’s butler.
This one obviously aims for Colin Farrell, reprising the role he played in 2022′s The Batman , to do for the Penguin what Heath Ledger did for the Joker. There’s no dearth of ambition; in other words, this is an HBO production. The show looks good and bears all the hallmarks of a very particular (if increasingly hackneyed) model of prestigious TV in which popular stories are repackaged and retold, this time from the antagonist’s point of view.
The Penguin picks up in the immediate aftermath of The Batman . Mob boss Carmine Falcone has been murdered, sparking a succession crisis, and the residents of Crown Point (the poorest part of Gotham City) are struggling to survive after catastrophic flooding caused by the Riddler. Oswald Cobb (Farrell), an underboss for the Falcones, sees in the chaos an opportunity to stoke the ongoing rivalry between his bosses and another crime family, the Maronis (led by Clancy Brown as Salvatore Maroni and Shohreh Aghdashloo as his wife, Nadia).
Egged on by his mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell), Cobb makes a play to seize power. LeFranc understands the comparison she’s inviting by introducing another schlubby, heavyset mobster obsessed with his domineering mother. James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano haunts this series, even if Cobb is an uglier and inferior copy.
Does it matter, I wondered a couple of episodes in, that the show acknowledges that it’s derivative? Even the title card, featuring a bold sans-serif font on a black background, feels like a riff on The Godfather rendered in The Sopranos red. But while The Penguin conjures a deliciously grimy, grungy, underground urban mood, there’s not much actual world-building - at least at first. That’s partly because the series orbits two characters defined by their isolation.
Still, the references can start to seem like a crutch. Allusions are fun, but you can’t build a world by proxy..
