The Penguin Review: Grading the Gotham City Crime Series
The Penguin has never been my favorite Batman villain. In fact, if you gathered 100 Batman fans in a room, I doubt you’d find a single one who’d admit (before this series at least) that Penguin was their favorite (or even second favorite) adversary of the Caped Crusader. This is both due to Batman’s impressive rogues gallery (Joker, Two Face, Riddler, etc.) and the fact that the Penguin has just never been all that interesting.
Up until this series, I’d always viewed Penguin as a poor man’s Kingpin from Marvel’s Daredevil comics. Like Kingpin, Penguin is a gangster with an impressive hold on his city’s underworld. Unlike Wilson Fisk, however, he usually comes across more goofy than intimidating. His alias, and even his equally silly birth name in the comics, Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot, basically lets us know how scared (or in this case not scared) of this character we should be.
The Penguin making his getaway on Batman: The Animated Series.
Director Tim Burton and actor Danny DeVito gave Batman fans another popular, non-goofy version of the character in 1992’s Batman Returns. DeVito’s Oswald Cobblepot is an over-the-top, malformed monster with pale skin who grossly eats raw fish. I was never a big fan of this Penguin. Of all the Batman villains who deserved a fresh take, Penguin was right up there. Well, he finally got one with this series.
The Penguin, which now has all eight episodes of its first season streaming on Max, is a fantastic reinvention of the Batman villain. The show is a spin-off of 2022’s Batman, a film that I really enjoyed overall. You don’t need to have seen the movie to enjoy The Penguin though.
In fact, although it takes place in the Batman universe, this isn’t really a superhero show at all. And that’s a good thing. There’s been an oversaturation of superhero TV shows and movies over the past decade. I’m totally fine focusing on characters that exist in a world with superheroes, but that doesn’t feature said heroes running around in capes and tights.
The Penguin on the 1960s Batman series - a very different type of show.
The Penguin is a crime drama centering on a mid-tier gangster named Oz Cobb. Cobb’s been able to gain some power over the years, but he isn’t at the top of the crime food chain in Gotham, where things are run by the powerful Falcone and Maroni Families. The series draws just as much from something like The Godfather as it does prior Batman stories, and it offers one of the most grounded takes on Gotham City that we’ve ever seen.
Colin Farrell stars as Oz and he’s great in the role. The actor dons heavy makeup and is completely unrecognizable. The designers did a superb job in creating makeup that’s not too over-the-top and still seem like we’re watching an actual person and not someone in costume.
Having Farrell in heavy makeup has the added benefit that viewers don’t feel like we’re watching a famous actor play a character. The other main characters in the series are also played by actors that aren’t super well-known.
Speaking of the other characters, they’re equally interesting. Scenes of Cobb and his mother give us insight into the character’s past and the reasons he’s become the man he is. His relationship with a younger man, named Vic, who he takes under his wing, shows us another side of him. All of this gives us a complete picture of Cobb and turns the show into a compelling character study.
The antagonist of The Penguin is Sofia Falcone, played wonderfully by Cristin Milioti. In contrast to many TV show villains, Sofia is well fleshed out, and viewers fully understand her motivations. She’s as intriguing as Oz, and the pair of characters make for some excellent television.
One of my main complaints with TV shows in general nowadays is that they often tend to feel like long movies. The Penguin does sort of fall into this trap. It doesn’t have quite enough episodes to enter into storylines besides our main, central one.
At the same time, certain episodes dragged a little bit. It’s odd, but I think the series could’ve benefitted either from being a couple episodes shorter (and just concentrating on the one main story as we do) or from being a couple episodes longer and exploring maybe some other aspects of Gotham City.
As it is, The Penguin is still an upper tier series with outstanding acting and an engaging story. There aren’t quite as many twists and turns as I felt the show could’ve taken to really elevate itself, but it was still largely an enjoyable watch. For TV fans looking for an entertaining crime drama about the rise of a villainous leader, The Penguin is one of the best new shows streaming.
Grade: 8/10