“A live-action television series about the Batman villain the Penguin, starring Colin Farrell.” Describing The Penguin , the new series from showrunner Lauren LeFranc and director Craig Zobel, makes you sound like you’re doing a bit. You have to start with The Batman , the Matt Reeves–helmed Bat-reboot that introduced Farrell’s version of the character.
He’s a good actor, of course, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what made director Matt Reeves cast Colin Farrell as a bad guy famous for being a funny-looking little short fat dude. Were there no funny-looking little short fat dudes available? Some guys wouldn’t have to put on about twelve square feet of prosthetics to make the role work? And why is he getting his own TV show? This isn’t the Joker or Catwoman we’re talking about here, it’s the villain the Joker and Catwoman make fun of in their group text with Two-Face and Poison Ivy. And what is up with this weird era where baddies like Penguin and Harley Quinn and freaking Kite-Man get their own shows on Max while the Caped Crusader himself gets his new cartoon drop-shipped to Amazon to air on Prime Video instead? In the absence of the help of the World’s Greatest Detective, alas, we’ll have to muddle through without these answers.
The inscrutable mystery of its very existence aside, the premiere of The Penguin does one thing right: It tells a little story, more than it simply sets the table. The movie, and many viewers’ broader base of Bat-knowledge, have already done the work of establishing the setting and several of the major players. This frees writer-showrunner LeFranc, who takes full advantage of the extra legroom here, to make a sort of mini-movie.
It’s a night-and-a-day in the life of ambitious mafia soldier Oz “Penguin” Cobb, as he impetuousouly murders his newly crowned boss Alberto Falcone (Michael Zegen) for laughing at him, then attempts to dispose of the body and cover up the crime while acting like he’s just going about his business. It’s got a fun After Hours / Collateral kind of feel to it, with that particular Aristotelian unity in its utility belt. It’s nice to watch a pilot that’s about more than “Here’s the basic concept, and here are some people you’ll need to get to know.
” There are a few such people, to be sure. Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) is a young hubcap thief who Oz nearly kills before gang-pressing him into getting rid of the corpse, becoming his driver, and eventually saving his life from the Falcones. (“Teenage hubcap thief gets caught” is actually the origin of the second Robin, Jason Todd, whom Batman caught trying to strip the Batmobile.
) He seems like a sweet kid, and Oz figures out at some point without asking that he was rendered homeless and possibly orphaned by the catastrophic events of the film. This, and having a lot in common in terms of their hardscrabble roots, leads him to spare the boy’s life and offer him a job rather than silence him permanently. Way on the other end of the empathetic spectrum Cristin Milioti is Sofia Falcone, Alberto’s psychotic sister.
Recently released from Arkham Asylum — I thought jailbreaks were the only way out of that place — she’s soft-spoken like a hissing cobra, and she’s correctly suspicious of Oz. Clancy Brown is Salvatore Maroni, an incarcerated rival of Alberto and Sofia’s late father Carmine, to whom Oz makes overtures when his own position in the Falcone family gets shaky. Michael Kelly and James Madio are Johnny Vitti and Milos Grapa, two top-level Falcone men who shut down Oz’s drug operation out of fear of the cops.
And Deirdre O’Connell is Oz’s mom Francis, who despite an undisclosed medical or mental condition advises her son to fight for what is rightfully his: the whole friggin’ city. That city is Gotham, of course, and Gotham City is a lead attraction of the show in its own right. Filmed in actual, honest-to-god New York City, The Penguin makes Gotham look like a vast and intimidating place, a place where it’s easy to go missing.
This goes double because large parts of the city were flooded by the masked terrorist the Riddler during the movie, killing thousands and leaving much of the town a disaster area, if not still actively underwater. Trains are constantly whirring and rattling and screeching by. Overpasses and girders overhang alleys and crowded streets.
You can watch the sun rise from a junkyard, or you can take a half-hour drive out to the suburbs and spend some time in a mansion, or you can do both in the same day, if you’re lucky. This is a Gotham I can believe in. I just wish it were nicer to look at.
After dark, and it’s mostly after dark, Zobel opts for the ugly orange color palette that is the digital default for urban nightscapes these days. It might be intended to make the place look hellish, but instead it just looks airless and prefab, which seems criminal when you’re filming all over the five boroughs. Every once in a while something interesting will happen with color, like a trip to the red light district with reds you can almost hear sizzling, or the use of white in Sofia’s outfit to suggest an otherworldly presence literally even before she comes into focus on screen.
Considering the resources marshaled for this thing, however, it’s reasonable to expect better. The main attraction here isn’t really Farrell’s interpretation of the Penguin. He is basically good in the role, as best I can tell from under all that shit they have glued to his face; he certainly does a terrific Noo Yawk accent, with just a hint of cartoonishness to suggest that Gotham is a different place.
The credit for making Cobb compelling and frightening is LeFranc’s. She makes him a terrifyingly sudden figure, ready to kill at a moment’s notice; the brief period of time when it seems he’s going to murder Victor after a long night spent disposing of Alberto’s body together is upsetting precisely because LeFranc makes you believe this guy really is capable of murdering a teenager and dumping him in a trunk. But is that enough to sustain eight episodes of this guy’s adventures? Not from what I’ve seen.
Farrell has star power, for sure, but it could be anyone under that makeup and fat suit; this isn’t Sugar , which depended on his luminous beauty every second he was on screen. Nor is it The Batman , which had, that’s right, the Batman in it for about 70% of the screen time. Purple Maserati with a suit to match (Clown Prince of Crime, call your lawyer and your stylist) and a brief use of a regular-ass umbrella aside, there’s also none of the fun goofy flash that characterizes the Penguin in the comics and cartoons.
Hell, his last name has been shortened from the silly superhero-comics surname Cobblepot to plain old Cobb. (PR materials for the show stress this, even, though presumably just to get people not to say Cobblepot incorrectly.) In a statement on the series, LeFranc wrote, “We delve into themes involving trauma, masculinity, identity, narcissism, wealth and class disparity.
” How about delving into the themes of a guy in a top hat and monocle who has a machine-gun and helicopter blades in his umbrella and fights a man in a Halloween costume? It’s 2024 — I promise you audiences are familiar enough with superheroes and supervillains to put up with some of the zaniness that made the culture fall in love with the concepts in the first place. You could spend this time watching The Sopranos, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire , something about urban crime that isn’t also about characters refurbished from children’s comics, awkwardly shoehorned into a show where people are stripped nude and have their armpits sliced by piano wire. Alternately, you could simply watch a story about Batman characters that actually has Batman in it — the iconic superhero who puts on a scary black outfit (in Reeves’s movie the look is intelligently updated to make him look more like a slasher than a vampire) and fights crime committed by Lewis Carroll characters.
Instead, you have The Penguin , and it’s neither fish nor fowl. Sean T. Collins ( @theseantcollins ) writes about TV for Rolling Stone , Vulture , The New York Times , and anyplace that will have him , really.
He and his family live on Long Island..
