Who needs Batman when we have the Penguin? – DNyuz

However ambiguous it may be, it’s a compliment to the new crime drama The Penguin (premiering on HBO on September 19) that it hardly feels like a franchise spin-off. The series is a spin-off of Matt Reeves‘s 2022 movie The Batmanyet another reimagining of Gotham City and its various heroes and villains. But besides a few references here and there, The Penguin—from the maker Lauren LeFranc—plays largely as a self-contained story, a tough and satisfying underworld saga with a half-righteous politics at its core.

The title character is no umbrella-wielding, crotchety, rotund dandy named Oswald Cobblepot, as he has long been in the Batman world. He is now Oz Cobb, a hobbling golem of a man, abusive and ruthless as he tries to claw his way to the top of Gotham’s criminal hierarchy. He is played, as he was in The Batmanby a heavily fabricated Colin Farrella powerful act of physical transformation complemented by Farrell’s more analogous shifts in voice and posture. It’s a big, absorbing performance, mesmerizing in both its sweeping gestures and its careful detail.

Oz is probably a sociopath, but he is capable of old-fashioned neighborhood charm. He will beat up a politician and then help him get out of a tight parking space. He will come very close to killing a meddling street urchin, Victor (Happy Rhenzy), but decide at the last minute to take him under their wing, as if the suddenly vanished deadly threat was no problem at all. Time and again we see his ruthless villainy tinged with the kindness of an average man, either a calculated strategy or a representation of a real conflict between morality and a howling void.

To further complicate the portrayal, there is the matter of Oz’s mother, Francis (the great Deirdre O’Connell), a senile old battle-axe to whom Oz is deeply devoted. She may be the last thing that really ties Oz to the realm of decency, though their relationship is anything but pleasant—as is thoroughly, perhaps exhaustively, explained as The Penguinit continues.

The series is a jumble of plots. At first it seems like Victor’s protégé story will take center stage, but then he fades into the background so Oz can deal with his mother issues. And so a formidable antagonist can emerge: Sophia Falcone, the troubled scion of a mafia family just released from Arkham Asylum, played with tics and spins by Christin Milioti. She, like Oz, is a villain with complex emotional shadows. Sophia has been seriously wronged in her life, but has chosen to deal with all that pain by doubling down on her family’s evil.

Sophia and Oz battle for power in a Gotham ravaged by the events of The Batman. The film’s climactic floods have devastated a deprived neighborhood, and a drug war is being fought on multiple fronts. There’s an opportunity in the chaos, which Oz hopes to exploit. He and Sophia both adopt a populist platform to mobilize gangs to their cause. The Penguin imagines a kind of criminal class proletariat rising up to reclaim its autonomy from the syndicate oligarchs. It’s a neat trick, an exciting allusion to real-world debate wrapped in gangster pulp.

The Penguin is a smart show, cleverly balancing graphic violence with melodrama, social commentary with tongue-in-cheek humor. Its shortcomings lie in its ravenous ambition to tell too many stories at once. Characters get lost in that narrative thicket, or are forced to change motivations on a dime. You’re left wishing for a more solid, focused storyline to the season, one that would make the finale’s grim conclusion all the more satisfying. There’s a lot of plot wasted in eight episodes; you’re left wondering where the show could possibly go, if Farrell were to agree to the arduous prosthetic journey for another tour of duty.

While that is undoubtedly an ordeal, I hope Farrell agrees to do it all again. He gives an endlessly compelling performance, which is well matched by his fellow actors, particularly O’Connell, Milioti and an underused Carmen Ejogo as Oz’s sort-of girlfriend. They all richly inhabit the show’s well-articulated version of Gotham, a swamp of tribes and cultures struggling to survive amid the entropy of all things.

The series almost certainly could have thrived on its own, separate from the IP lore that birthed it in the first place. It doesn’t exhibit the same synergistic pressures that weigh down the Marvel shows that have flooded Disney+ for the past four years. Here, DC finally finds its perhaps unintended advantage: its scattered mythology, its countless stops and starts and reinventions, have created holes through which creative thinking has crept in. If The Penguin tight in service of a larger story, I doubt it would have as much bite and personality as it does. Which may be the Penguin’s dream come true: out of chaos comes order.