The Penguin is a comic-book show with no interest in comic books

The question facing The Penguin—HBO’s gritty, tonally oddball new comic-book crime show—is the same question that’s haunted pretty much every series of its ilk since Tony Soprano first made that long, lonely drive through the New Jersey Turnpike: Why this violent, socially ill-adjusted, white male sociopath? What is it about Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb (not Cobblepott, the character having been stripped of half of his usual name, alongside his historical attachments to generational power or wealth, in the transition to TV) that’s worth spending eight hours with?

Those hoping to find the answer in the pages of the comics the show is ostensibly based on will likely come away scratching their heads. Set in the same rust-dusted version of Gotham City as Matt Reeves’ 2022 reboot project The Batman—a comic-book movie already so “grounded” as to be borderline subterranean—showrunner Lauren LeFranc’s show couldn’t be less interested in trick umbrellas, capes, or cinematic action of any but the most brutal and utilitarian varieties. Change the building signs, strip out a few references to “Arkham” and the Riddler’s late-film attack on the city, and this pilot could be from any of a dozen shows about a mid-tier criminal with delusions of upper-tier success anywhere in America.

Which leaves us with Oswald Cobb himself, and Farrell’s efforts to take this character—a loose collection of crime-guy tropes, prosthetics, and quirks enervated by The Batman‘s only truly fun performance—and build a workable TV protagonist out of him. Step one is to lessen him, the better for both threats and upward mobility: The Penguin from the film was comfortable playing king of the castle, albeit one beholden to the boss (Jon Turturro); here, the show makes it clear that Cobb is middle-management at best, serving at the whims of the nigh-aristocratic Falcone crime family. Initially, that means newly crowned scion Alberto (Michael Zegen), at least until he makes the serious mistake of confusing Oz’s bouts of sentimentality for weakness, when he catches his new underling snooping around the remains of the ruined Iceberg Lounge. This initial scene (arriving after a quick, pensive montage to ground the show in the immediate aftermath of The Batman) allows Farrell to sketch out the base parameters for this more expanded version of the character: deferential, maybe even obsequious, and with talents that mostly run to the verbal. (There are no big, expensive car chases here, just a few sharp turns in the rain.) The Cobb we see here is a schmoozer and manipulator, searching out his target’s weak points with a bit of fumble, but one who knows that the powerful are only safe to be around when they feel powerful. And, yes, he’s maybe even a little sweet, as Alberto notes right before things get violent. It can be hard to read Farrell here, given that he’s working under masks both literal and figurative, but there’s a nostalgic cast to his various obsessions that suggests his pining to be a respected, Don Corleone-esque friendly neighborhood crime boss might actually be genuine.

But it’s not as genuine as the barking laugh Cobb gives when, after Alberto mocks these modest dreams, he impulsively guns him down in the empty loft, setting the events of the series in motion. It’ll turn into flop sweat in a second, in the first of The Penguin‘s genuinely good comedy beats. But that laugh—which gets repeated at the episode’s end, when he’s unleashed yet more mayhem on his enemies and saved his own skin—is Farrell letting the power-hungry chaos gremlin in Oswald Cobb’s soul out, just for a second. Those moments let you understand why an actor of Farrell’s caliber is even doing this show, plumbing these otherwise familiar depths, portraying a man getting a taste for real power after a lifetime of settling for less.

But there’s quite a bit of road for us to cover between here and there. And some of it is pretty cliché stuff—none more so than the quickness with which Oz secures himself his very own teen sidekick, in the form of Rhenzy Feliz’s Victor, who the gangster finds trying to steal the rims from his car in the aftermath of Alberto’s death. (In a show with even an iota more interest in its source material, we’d assume this was a direct reference to the origin of the second Robin, Jason Todd, who Batman caught trying to do the same thing to the Batmobile—but it’s hard to imagine a show less interested in comic-book Easter eggs than this one.) At least in this first episode, Victor, having been pressed into impromptu apprenticeship, exists to do little more than give us a bit of an audience POV on Cobb, and to give Farrell a scene partner to play with as he drives around town, trying to clear the tracks of his impulsive murder. You can feel all involved working to imbue sympathetic qualities into their leading man, most notably in the moment when Cobb, clearly identifying with the young would-be criminal, spares his life instead of doing the smart thing and executing him. But none of it works, at least in part because Feliz is giving a more grounded performance in response to Farrell’s high-energy clowning. We hold out hope that Feliz will find a character here, but for this first episode, Vic gets little more to do than stutter and take gawking looks at his co-star’s facial accessories.

(Should we take a second to dive deep on these? Much was made of the series’ makeup work in the lead-up, including bringing designer Michael Marino out at Comic-Con with the rest of the show’s cast to talk about his contributions. As in The Batman, the various prosthetics add up to a genuinely good piece of work. It’s eye-catching without being distracting, allowing Farrell to still emote affectingly. At the very least, we didn’t spend the whole episode thinking, “Oh, hey, that’s Colin Farrell with shit glued to his face,” so, mission accomplished. Certainly, it’s less distracting than the waddle Farrell adopts while ambling around the city.)

There are other clichés on offer in Penguin‘s first episode: the bit where Cobb finds a solution to his problems while watching an old movie (Rita Hayworth in Gilda, underlining his throwback tastes) and the portion where he takes Vic out to meet his dementia-afflicted mom in the Gotham suburbs. Deirdre O’Connell is effective enough as Francis Cobb, but you can see the turn in her performance coming from a mile away: Of course, she’s the Livia Soprano to her son’s comic-book Tony, urging him to power with just a soupçon of incestuous overtones. We don’t get much of the relationship between Cobb and his mother in this first episode, but what’s there operates at enough intensity to make it clear that this is where the gears that turn him are getting their motivational force. Whether that familial dynamic has similar dramatic power, given how thoroughly these kind of storytelling beats have already been explored in crime TV, is still up for debate.

Cristin Milioti (Photo: Macall Polay/HBO)

The impact of the show’s other star, once the episode finally deploys her, is less cliché. We suspected, coming into this, that Cristin Milioti was going to give Farrell a run for his money, having turned out stunningly good, slightly unhinged performances in recent years in projects like Palm Springs and Made For Love. (Infuriatingly, you’ll have to take our word on the latter, since Max has scrubbed the series from its servers. Nice curation, dinguses.) Stalking into an out-of-focus shot as Cobb tries to placate his bosses, Milioti’s Sofia Falcone immediately takes command of the scene with soft-voiced stillness—offering up an arch “I’m rehabilitated” about her recent stint in Arkham—and asking Cobb if he maybe hasn’t seen her beloved brother anywhere any time recently. Milioti might soft-sell the menace, but the show quickly lets us know we’ve met our chief antagonist, as she drags Oswald out to a lunch that’s half philosophical conversation, half intimidation play. (It’s also half zoo-feeding time, as the previously incarcerated Sofia wolfs down her food and praises her and her enemy as “untamed.”) By the time she has guards choking Oz out and threatening to garrote off his arm in a pleasantly visceral little bit of torture, it’s practically overkill: Milioti has already ably scared the shit out of both him and us.

And if a lot of this sounds like a collection of basic-ass crime-show tropes elevated by a pair of great performances, well…yeah (down to Cobb finding a way to get his enemies pitted against each other, with a brief stop-off to Blackgate Penitentiary to get Clancy Brown’s former crime boss Salvatore Maroni into the mix). It remains to be seen what The Penguin has beyond that, honestly, although we suspect the show’s sense of humor—including a moment when Cobb, apparently earnestly, critique’s Vic’s mutilation of a corpse that ends up saving his skin, Farrell leaning hard into the comedy of his “complaining about the rescue” pettiness—might be its ace in the hole. Director Craig Zobel has done a fine enough job of recreating the basic look of The Batman, all grainy sunlight and amber streetlights, but the show itself is so disinterested in anything to do with its source material that the connection feels largely academic. (There’s little of the brooding, noir-esque sensibility that lent the film its unique identity amongst the Bat-flicks; Oz’s troubles aren’t half as operatic as Bruce Wayne’s.) Farrell and Milioti remain compelling, but if—as the show promises—The Penguin is on the rise, we can’t quite grasp that trajectory just yet.

Stray observations

• • The Penguin‘s generally excellent casting includes an appearance by House Of Cards‘ Michael Kelley as a Falcone underboss. We first glimpse him in compromising photos that Oz recovers from Carmine’s stash in the Iceberg Lounge.
• • Rex Calabrese, the old-school mobster Cobb waxes nostalgic for, is in fact a canon DC Comics character. Unlike in this continuity—where the honor goes to the late Carmine Falcone—he’s Selina Kyle’s real father.
• • Cobb successfully pegs from his driver’s license that Victor’s home was destroyed when Riddler blew up the Gotham seawall. Later, we see a Riddler cultist passing out “See Gotham’s true face” flyers on the subway.
• • Farrell has a lot of fun with Cobb’s raging insecurities—clock his pride at his stupid car air freshener, or the almost sheepish way he checks to see if the sex worker he pays for an alibi is seeing anyone else.
• • “On three…eh, you know what, just do it.”
• • Double-checking…Cobb’s wearing the same leg brace he has here in The Batman, although the limp feels less pronounced there. There’s a good character beat when he refuses to use the disability seats on the subway.
• • “Nine times out of ten, these top-tier guys want to meet face-to-face to feel big, so I make myself small, they feel better about themselves, I get to go back to work.”
• • Sofia Falcone is a major part of classic Batman stories “The Long Halloween” and “Dark Victory”; the latter is where she picked up the “Hangman” name she was also saddled with in this universe.
• • Farrell, whispering so softly the mics barely pick it up: “He fucking laughed at me.”
• • When do we get a scene showing the life of the school bus driver who straight-up murdered that one thug who was fighting with Oz in his car?
• • Milioti gets saddled with some pretty on-the-nose dialogue in her last big scene, stating that Cobb is “so good at talking your way out of things, even at the cost of someone else’s life.” She sells it, but you can see the struggle.
• • And with that, welcome to our coverage of The Penguin! I’ll be reviewing all 8 episodes of the show, as we see how it builds the connective tissue between the Batman films—and, more importantly, tries to tell a genuinely interesting story about the man named Oswald Cobb.