A completely different story: Friday

When Oswald “Oz” Cobb (Colin Farrell) stumbles through a dark cityscape and teams up with Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) to pit several mafia clans against each other in a game of cat and mouse, no viewer would actually think he’s currently watching a spin-off series from the last Batman film. Batman, the superhero from the DC comic universe, will appear in at least the first episodes of the lavishly produced HBO series available so far The penguin not at all. Let’s see if he still jumps out of the box like Kai at the end.

Of course, anyone who recognizes Matt Reeve’s three-hour bleakness The Batman (2022), Colin Farrell, who was actually made up beyond recognition by make-up artists and played a supporting role there as “The Penguin”. But the mafia series, set in a flood-ravaged Gotham, has none of the morality or pathos usually celebrated in the DC universe. On the contrary: The penguin is a stylized, atmospherically compact, sometimes almost socially realistic urban drama about organized crime and the desperate struggle for survival of those who have not been given a good place in the hierarchy.

There are three: first of all, there is Oz, the henchman of the recently murdered head of the Falcone clan, and his daughter Sofia, who was deported by the family to a psychiatric clinic because she threatened to become a danger to the family. head. Oz was once the driver of the mafia daughter who would inherit the Falcone empire, including its eternal enmity with the Maroni clan, before she was locked up due to security concerns. After the death of Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong), a dispute breaks out within the clan, sparking Oz into a real gang war. Sofia helps him and goes to war against her family. In addition to this escalation of power politics in the mafia environment, the question is: who controls the trade in a new drug that is grown in cellars on mushrooms and consumed as a red, liquidizing crystal? The third person literally fighting for survival is non-white teenager Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), who was forcibly recruited by Oz as a driver and whose family died when the slums of Gotham were flooded.

Family matters

The loss of family and the struggle for family members and their legacy become the central motif of this series. Oz cares for his demented mother in the suburbs. Sofia tries to come to terms with her mother’s suicide and hatred of Falcone’s other family members, and discovers disturbing connections. Victor has to deal with the fact that his neighborhood is underwater – because of the one at the end of the film The Batman flood caused by an attack – and he no longer has a social reference point. These three lonely, desperate and violent characters join forces, with Sofia’s campaign against her family quickly becoming a battle of a tough woman against the all-consuming male violence of her clan.

The penguin is not the first attempt in the DC universe to leave the genre cage of flat fantasy. Already had it joker (2019), the sequel of which hits theaters on October 5, is very different from previous DC stories, this also applies to The penguin. These films and series from the so-called DC Elseworlds try to capitalize on the popularity of the brand, but tell different stories than the established heroes.

Are spin-off series perhaps the better sequels in the fantastic universes with which the film industry has lured millions of viewers to cinemas for decades in tried and tested branded product lines? Another example is the series Andor (2022) from the Star Wars universe, which has nothing to do with the star saga’s other “May the Force be with you” fuss. The dark, political series with an anti-fascist slant against the Empire, including street battles against Imperial riot police, largely forgoes Star Wars’ usual fantasy apparatus. Andor Comes without lightsabers, Jedis and floating ghosts. Instead, the revolutionary who becomes a subject of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is presented.

The series also has its own emphasis Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023) on Apple TV+. The “Legendary Pictures/Monsterverse” spin-off series, which has brought five feature films about Godzilla and King Kong to theaters since 2014 (most recently Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire), tells the story of three young people who suddenly find themselves in the middle of the global battle for giant monsters. Instead of aggressive military officers or secretive scientists dealing with the phenomenon of dinosaur-like creatures or combating them through extermination, here is the strange elementary school teacher Cate Randa (Anna Sawai, who just won an Emmy for her performance in the series Shogun award-winning) from the Bay Area, the young artist Kentaro (Ren Watabe) from Tokyo and the young black hacker May (Kiersey Clemons) are central to the story. The story of Godzilla’s destruction of San Francisco (from the film Godzilla vs. Kong) remains in the background at first. To this end, the series unfolds an exciting Japanese-American family story, which mainly talks about anti-Asian racism in the US. It is about trauma, cultural and family identities, but also about personal secrets.

As well Monarch: Legacy of Monsters the action-packed blockbusters of the Godzilla series Andor and now too The penguin cast their anchors in completely different waters. That is exciting, but it shows once again that the film industry in the field of fantasy only invests large budgets in proven product lines.

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The penguin Lauren LeFranc USA 2024, since September 20 on Sky, new episodes every week