Colin Farrell in HBO’s ‘The Batman’ Spinoff

I’m not saying HBO’s The Penguin is derivative, but it’s the second TV show in less than six months in which Colin Farrell plays a character obsessed with the glamour of black-and-white Old Hollywood movies — specifically using clips from Gilda to evoke nostalgia for a period that our hero is too young to have experienced firsthand, a poignant yearning for a world with mystique and morality that no longer exist.

Built into the semi-recent spate of origin stories for classic TV and movie villains — Norman Bates, the Joker, half of the nefarious Disney catalogue — is an indictment of non-empathetic viewership. 

These revisionist approaches to iconic tales assume that, in the process of goading audiences into rooting for figures more traditionally coded as “hero,” there was a failure to acknowledge that even the seemingly worst of figures have their awfulness rooted in very human conditions: loneliness, trauma, treatable mental illness, hatred of Dalmatians. 

It’s a subgenre that says, “Behind the story you know is this story you never considered,” an ostensible revelation that opens up whole new, fresh avenues that keep us from having to relive the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents ad infinitum. 

The Penguin is a spinoff from Matt Reeves’ The Batman, an already ground-level approach to DC Comics lore that introduced us to Farrell, wholly unrecognizable beneath layers of prosthetics, as a nightclub owner and second-tier gangster. Here’s the thing: You offer me the Penguin as a stunted, fish-swallowing freak with an ill-fitting tuxedo and skin so pale he’s practically translucent, and I’ll happily request, “Tell me more.” Offer me a Penguin who’s a husky, underappreciated mobster with insecurity fueled by an unhealthy attachment to a mother who coddles him with one hand and emasculates him with another, and my first reaction will be, “Yes, I’ve seen The Sopranos before.”

Creator Lauren LeFranc (Chuck) has reconsidered Oswald Cobb — the “-lepot” must have been dropped at Ellis Island — not as a colorful and outsized figure in need of complicated explanation, but as an ’00s-style prestige television antihero, relatable not because he boasts characteristics that every viewer will relate to, but because we’ve been relating to characters like him on TV for 25 years. 

It’s no wonder that this latest piece of Batman-without-Batman fabulism — see Joker, Gotham, several CW series and Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler — is least interesting when it focuses on its title character. It finds far more intrigue in Sofia Falcone, played by Cristin Milioti in the show’s defining performance.

The action picks up in the aftermath of the events of The Batman, specifically the destruction of the Gotham seawall and the flooding of the city. Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong in flashbacks) is dead and Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown) is in prison, so there’s a power vacuum in Gotham’s criminal underbelly. 

Alberto (Michael Zegen), Carmine’s son, might be ready to ascend, but he’s an addict — “drops” are Gotham’s trendy drug of choice. For the purposes of our story, Alberto also has too little respect for Oswald, who has made big promises to both his withholding mother (Deirdre O’Connell) and the lady-of-the-night (Carmen Ejogo’s Eve) whom he loves. Everybody overlooks Oz and several people mockingly call him “The Penguin” because of a waddle from a poorly managed clubfoot, but he finds a new acolyte in Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), an orphaned teen from a lower-income neighborhood of Gotham that was left in ruins after the flooding.

The only person who senses what Oswald might be capable of is Sofia, a serial killer also known as The Hangman, who’s just been released from the overcrowded Arkham Asylum after a decade. Sofia and Oz, who used to be her driver, have a dark past, and things threaten to get even darker in the present as they engage in something of a game of thrones — especially since Robert Pattinson’s Batman is nowhere to be seen or mentioned.

Though Gotham is its own distinctively bleak urban space, not quite New York City but basically New York City, its overall universe casts a gloomy mirror on a 21st-century America on the verge of class rebellion. The town’s working-class citizens are sick of being neglected and left in impotent chaos. Its ethnic criminal enclaves are fed up with existing in the Falcone/Maroni shadow. All of Gotham’s institutions are poisoned and in the pocket of its upper one percent, which would normally at least include Bruce Wayne, but see above.

Although The Penguin makes overt reference to gangster classics like The Godfather and White Heat, and although it left me thinking at various points of a half-dozen different HBO titles in the Sopranos vein, it just as frequently reminded me of wannabes in the prestige space, like Ozark or Low Winter Sun. The thing you’ll probably compare it to least is The Batman, which is by design. There are fleeting franchise acknowledgments that don’t really even count as Easter eggs, a determined ethos that holds up … until it doesn’t anymore.

The story is an accelerated clash that rushes through three or four seasons of plot in these eight episodes. Eventually, it’s just various bad guys making similar and repetitively violent power plays, in which alliances are made but then too hastily broken for any pleasure to be taken in even the most fruitful of character interactions. Like entirely too many shows of this type, it treats us to cycles to colorful threats, sadistic torture, predictable betrayals and subsequent body disposals, delivered with professional polish but not enough creativity.

Perhaps the biggest question anybody will have about The Penguin is whether Farrell’s prosthetics work as a full meal after the amuse-beak of The Batman. In that respect, The Penguin really is a qualified triumph. The makeup effects, designed by Mike Marino, hold up under extended closeups and in all but the brightest lighting. You can glimpse Oz’s resemblance to Colin Farrell only occasionally, but this isn’t one of those prosthetic jobs that leave the wearer unable to articulate emotions through the layers of rubber. The character is allowed to be awkward and infuriated and even, though perhaps insufficiently, funny and eccentric. 

Farrell’s eyes are always visible and expressive, conveying traces of the wounded soul behind an otherwise bumbling and vicious monster. Playing off of Tony winner O’Connell, who treats Ma Penguin like a figure out of Eugene O’Neill, and Feliz, who offers elements of decency in a world where it’s rare, Farrell reveals a slightly softer Penguin. 

The “qualification” to the triumph is that a tremendous amount of effort and even innovation has been put into making a professionally handsome movie star into … a character actor. I never shook the feeling that this could have been a breakout opportunity for somebody like Eric Lange, Pruitt Taylor Vince or John Carroll Lynch, passing the savings on prosthetics along to David Zaslav. Instead, it’s an opportunity for Farrell to do effective if exaggerated James Gandolfini cosplay, right down to certain moments at which the accent similarities become uncanny. 

Oz proves capable of carrying this story, just not in a fresh way. That’s why attentions are likely to shift to Milioti’s Sofia, a character whose presence comes with less baggage from the comics. Sofia is treated more in that Cruella/Maleficent vein as women whose dark path is set in motion by the assumptions and restrictions of the patriarchy. Strutting around in the best examples of the series’ costume design, Milioti makes Sofia more plausible than Oz as a tragic victim and embodiment of everything wrong with Gotham, a figure you can feel sad for and scared of in equal measure. The mano a mano dynamic between the pair yields Milioti and Farrell’s best work, but the interplay viewers will crave peaks far too early.

The hurried nature of the plotting means that many of its highest profile supporting actors — Ejogo, Brown, Michael Kelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Theo Rossi — are underserved. The same is actually true of Gotham, with the locations and production design shining in several episodes, but getting lost in the narrative churn of others. The murky and grimy visual style established in the first three chapters, directed by Craig Zobel and shot by Darran Tiernan, becomes generally flatter as the season goes along.

The Penguin takes a place in the middle ground of a subgenere that I can never dismiss fully, because every once in a while it yields a Bates Motel or even a Perry Mason (HBO’s version), amid too many entries that never find a necessity. But if the answer to the question, “How did Character X get to be the way they were?” is, “Well, have you seen …” then you haven’t thought far enough outside of the box.