Who Needs the Batman?

Photo: Macall Polay / HBO

Batman doesn’t appear in The Penguin, and if you accept the show on its own terms, you won’t miss him. Not when Cristin Milioti, as organized-crime heiress Sofia Falcone, is doing her best clenched-jaw O-Ren Ishii impression at the head of a table of cutthroat criminals, intimidating them and bending them to her will. And certainly not when Colin Farrell, from beneath a ton of prosthetics as striving henchman Oz Cobb, is providing an outsize version of gabagool excellence: waggling his eyebrows in shock, Kubrick-staring with disgust, and pontificating about the evils of the upper classes like he’s Frank Sobotka running for another union term. This is all praise, and on the strength of those two performances, The Penguin (premiering early tonight on HBO and Max, then on Sundays for the remainder of the eight-episode season) pulls off an exorcism that initially seemed impossible.

What series creator Lauren LeFranc achieves is a contradiction. By excising Batman and his fantastical sway on Gotham from The Penguin, the city’s criminal underworld feels more grounded in the quotidian details of drug deals and power plays, in actual matters of life and death. Frank Sinatra’s “Call Me Irresponsible” plays on the soundtrack, someone references Ginger Rogers’s tap-dancing prowess, and Rita Hayworth’s Gilda reruns on an old box-set TV, and there’s no interruption in our suspension of disbelief. But somehow, within that earthly milieu, The Penguin also slots in Milioti and Farrell doing big-A Acting — chewing up scenery and snarling over dialogue like they’re low-key auditioning for a Martin Scorsese movie. The tension in the series’ contradictory flavors of minimalism and maximalism allows The Penguin to slide right along, gathering speed as it moves toward a final act that reflects LeFranc’s deep understanding of her titular character and her extreme confidence in refusing audiences the hell-yeah ending they might think they want.

We’re never really free of Bruce Wayne; Hollywood usually only allows a few years to pass in between stabs at this franchise. There were only 13 months between Christian Bale wrapping his version of the character in The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 and Ben Affleck being cast for Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel follow-up in 2013. The same year that Joker used the Waynes as representatives of the evil one percent, Robert Pattinson was cast as a younger goth version of Gotham’s nocturnal prodigal son in Matt Reeves’s The Batman, of which The Penguin is a spinoff. There were 100 episodes of Gotham, and Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler aired for three seasons. Earlier this summer, Batman: Caped Crusader centered the titular character in detective mode, investigating everything from jewel theft and arson to energy vampires and ghosts. Gotham City has been defined by the Bruce Wayne–Batman duality — and the man’s dead parents, and the burden of his wealth, and all his unresolved trauma — for a long time. And while The Penguin certainly has some of that stuff, because you can’t set a story in Gotham without familial dysfunction, class tension, and opportunistic criminals, it also feels entirely distinct from so much of what’s come before thanks to a series of canny casting, writing, and design choices.

LeFranc’s unsentimental sidelining of Batman allows The Penguin to thrive in his absence, revealing new textures of a Gotham we might have thought we already knew everything about. Without him, the series is rooted to the ground — to all the low-level crime happening on Gotham’s streets and the way loss dictates our shifting barometers for right and wrong — and the season finds zany and seething ways to explore that spectrum of morality. Oz Cobb and Sofia Falcone can do bad all by themselves in entertaining and watchable ways, and many of the series’ character dynamics thrum with a “chaos is a ladder” energy that evokes HBO peer Game of Thrones. The production and art design are most exciting when the series looks backward to the mid-century pop culture and styling that shaped Oz and Sofia’s childhoods; sure, it’s Casino and Scarface pastiche, but his purple pinstripe suits and her plunging necklines and fur coats look great. And while the series’ pacing is uneven and its plot machines broadly familiar, especially when it pits Sofia, Oz, and various ethnically organized gangs against one another, the overall execution is thankfully more Gangs of London than The Continental.

The Penguin begins a week after the events of The Batman and provides a little “previously on” via nighttime-news reports. Carmine Falcone (played in the film by John Turturro and recast in the series with Mark Strong), Gotham’s previous patriarch of the criminal underworld and secret father to Selina Kyle/Catwoman, was revealed to be an informant who helped orchestrate the downfall of his rivals, the Maroni family, and was assassinated. A terrorist plot hatched by the Riddler flooded Gotham City and inspired Batman to reveal himself more fully to the public as he saved citizens and took out the Riddler’s incel-like followers. But even FEMA government aid and Gotham’s mayor-elect preaching unity can’t assuage the sense that Gotham is collapsing in on itself; when Falcone’s second-in-command, Oz, breaks into his boss’s old apartment to gaze through its gigantic windows at the city, what he sees is dingy and dirty, as though a layer of soot and mold have settled over every available surface. It might not look like much, but Oz — nicknamed the Penguin for his limp, but seemingly also his general teardrop shape and beaky, scarred face — sees a chance to take over.

His attempted move from Falcone background fixer to head of the family who runs Gotham’s drug trade will require eliminating a number of adversaries. Next in line for the crown is Falcone’s playboy son, Alberto (Michael Zegen), who despite being more of a Fredo Corleone than a Michael is supported by allies like family underboss Johnny Vitti (Michael Kelly). The Maronis who Carmine betrayed are still a threat; even though Sal (Clancy Brown) is in prison, his wife, Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo), is more than capable to rule in his stead. (One of the series’ most unexpected surprises is that Nadia, like Aghdashloo herself, is Iranian, and Sal and Nadia converse as much in Farsi as they do in English.) There are other ethnic lines drawn among Gotham’s gangs, each scrabbling for a little bit more of the pie that Carmine used to keep mostly for himself. But most foreboding is Falcone’s daughter and Alberto’s sister Sofia, released from Arkham Asylum after years inside and with major grievances against Oz, who used to be her driver. “I’ve been rehabilitated,” she says with a tight smile when she and Oz meet again, and Milioti’s skill as an actress is most evident in these economical moments when she gives us a glimpse into a psyche that has been ripped apart.

The Sofia character is one of the series’ greatest divergences from the comic-book storylines that loosely inspire The Penguin, and her competition against Oz to rule Gotham’s underworld drives most of the tension; each of them tumbles into increasing violence to get the upper hand against the other. Sometimes those escalations are when the series feels the most rote in its cycle of scheme-backstab-attack-repeat and the most indebted to its references; I can’t complain about The Penguin mimicking Gangs of New York, but when it comes to The Godfather, Boardwalk Empire got there first. (And was better composed; The Penguin is flatly lit and its action editing can be erratic.) But then Milioti makes some kind of sly-yet-furious gesture to show us the depths of Sofia’s resentment against her family, like filling a glass of wine to the brim while her male relatives look on in disgust. Or Farrell’s Oz takes his assistant, Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), a teen from the same Gotham slums where Oz grew up, out for a meal at a fancy French restaurant, leans forward in interest when Victor talks about his now-dead parents’ money problems, and then raises a toast in their honor. Those moments feel unique to The Penguin’s treatment of these characters, and they go a long way in balancing out the series’ predictable story flow.

The word transformative is dangerously close to an acting cliché, but it doesn’t feel like enough to describe what Farrell is doing in The Penguin. The only thing that remains recognizable about the actor are his eyes, and he uses them to sell the emotional arc of this entire performance. Oz is written to lean into other people’s suspicions of him, and Farrell has a great time hamming up his scumminess: flashing smiles so wide his numerous gold teeth are visible, pitching his already-affected “fuhgeddaboudit” voice a little bit higher when he’s anxious, never letting a joke about another man’s lack of masculinity pass him by. The character hits upon every single feasible Italian American stereotype; our guy even lets out a Joey Tribbiani–esque “How you doin’?” But one of the series’ cleverest touches is how it reveals Oz’s identity as a malleable, deliberate performance shaped by his relationship with his demanding mother and codified by years spent trying to fit in with the Falcones. It’s a work of chameleonic cunning, one that uses the character’s motor-mouthed speaking style and reliance on abrasive humor to lull us into a kind of amused complacency before a turn that makes it extremely clear this isn’t an antihero story. The Penguin is a portrait of a villain, and Farrell’s likeability is its trickiest secret weapon.

Both Milioti and Farrell are playing characters who veer into cartoon and caricature, but they retain within them the jagged edges of humanity — jealousy and greed, grief and lust, self-loathing and braggadociousness — that make The Penguin simultaneously pulpy and plausible. And, more effectively than either Christopher Nolan’s or Todd Phillips’s films, populist; like any worthwhile story about organized crime, The Penguin is really about what it takes to make it in America. What rules must one break to get ahead? Which alliances, and whose labor, should be protected in a dog-eat-dog world? What is the cost of tapping out of this system or trying to break the wheel? Milioti and Farrell get parallel speeches about these questions, and The Penguin sometimes becomes repetitive in its treatment of the two of them as bizarro-mirror versions of each other. If one has a vision of a worker-led future, so must the other; if one has an overbearing parent, so must the other; if one is missing a lost sibling, so must the other. But that quality is forgivable when The Penguin gives its central pair so much room to grow, and the result is a spinoff that doesn’t need its cinematic precursor to light up the night.