“The Penguin” doesn't need Batman but could use less family drama

As Oz Cobb, Colin Farrell plays a long-suffering henchman trying to get on top for once.

It’s hard to tell a Batman story without Batman, and yet they keep coming. HBO’s new limited series The Penguin is the latest attempt, and though it’s unlikely to win a major award (like Joker) or run for five seasons (like Gotham), it manages to tell an entertaining crime saga without leaning too much on the absent Dark Knight — although it still ends up falling prey to some of the weaknesses inherent in Batman adaptations.

Colin Farrell reprises his role as the show’s title character (usually named Oswald Cobblepot, here rechristened as the less-fancy “Oz Cobb”) after previously playing him in the 2022 film The Batman. What was once a clever bit of stunt-casting has now become a full-fledged screen performance. Questions that were already raised by Farrell’s role in the film (i.e. why would you go through all the trouble of making one of the world’s most beautiful men look ugly when you could just hire a less perfect-looking character actor from the jump?) are even harder to ignore now that the performance exists within an HBO crime show, under the long shadow of The Sopranos.

Related: How The Penguin remixes Batman comics to create an original Gotham crime drama

One reason that David Chase’s trailblazing crime series remains so popular and acclaimed to this day (to the point that HBO just released a hagiographic docuseries about him) is that the cast was filled with skilled actors who look and feel like real people. Farrell’s Oz, by contrast, is a cartoon — albeit a loveable one, infused with pathos and verve by the actor and painted with truly impressive makeup by Michael Marino. It’s like if Al Pacino’s role in Dick Tracy was played entirely straight.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

One upside to Farrell’s makeup is that it centers an element of comic-book silliness in the middle of an otherwise deadly serious crime story. Sometimes it’s hard not to wish that the rest of the show carried more of the subversive energy of the central performance, but only one of Farrell’s costars really comes close. Carmen Ejogo, for instance, has very little to do as Oz’s favorite madam, but Cristin Milioti’s energetic portrayal of pain and vengeance is such a highlight that you occasionally feel that the show should be named after her instead.

Milioti plays Sofia Falcone, a disgraced daughter of late Gotham City crime boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro in the film, awkwardly recast with Mark Strong in the show) who has just gotten out of a 10-year stint in Arkham Asylum with scores to settle. After Carmine was killed in The Batman, Gotham’s criminal underworld has a major power vacuum to fill, and both Sofia and Oz have eyes on the throne. Oz is a long-suffering henchman who wants to be on top for once, and pitches other criminals on a populist “us against them” philosophy. Sofia, meanwhile, is a rich girl who has suffered even more at her family’s hands than she’s gained from them.

The Penguin is at its most entertaining when depicting the moves and counter-moves in this criminal power struggle. Oz’s clever attempts to play different crime families against each other are worthy of Dashiell Hammett’s classic noirs, and Sofia’s plays are often surprising and thrilling. Characters are frequently dispatched in brutally violent ways, and since this show is actually a sequel to The Batman rather than (as is so common with franchise TV these days) a prequel, the stakes feel high. It also helps that, though characters like Sal Maroni (Clancy Brown) and the Falcone family are drawn from the classic Batman comic The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, this show is riffing on them in new ways and not beholden to previously published material.

The Penguin gets much less interesting when it wallows in family psychodrama. Sofia’s family backstory is horrifying (her spotlight episode feels almost as devastating as Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) but spending a lot of time on Oz’s relationship with his mother (Deirdre O'Connell) on top of that feels like too much. The most fascinating element of The Batman was its consideration of the evil (intentional and otherwise) wrought by Thomas and Martha Wayne, but Batman’s parents occupy a special place in our modern mythology. It’s hard to muster similar interest for the dark backstory of the Penguin’s mother. Focusing so much on family actually makes this fictional Gotham City feel smaller (does everybody know each other from back in the day?) when this interlude between Batman films should ideally be expanding the setting rather than narrowing it.

Related: The Penguin will bridge the gap between The Batman and the upcoming sequel (exclusive)

Continuing the story of The Batman also means that The Penguin is stuck making sense of that movie’s ridiculous climax, in which Gotham was flooded and all the gritty realism embodied by a gangster Penguin and serial killer Riddler was overwhelmed by Biblical disaster. The flood still haunts Oz’s new sidekick Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), who is often struck by traumatic flashbacks of watching his family’s apartment building subsumed by the waves, but otherwise is hardly mentioned in the show, which can get confusing.

But it’s to the show’s credit that Batman himself is hardly mentioned at all. You can often feel these “Garfield Without Garfield” superhero stories straining to reference the absent protagonist even though they’re not supposed to (see: Madame Web), but Oz’s narrative admirably stands on its own. It’s funny, though, because this independent narrative arriving at the same moment that James Gunn and Peter Safran are kickstarting their new interconnected superhero universe is, frankly, pure DC. The publisher’s multiplicity of genres and characters will always tend more toward a multiverse than the more streamlined Marvel narrative.

But though The Penguin accomplishes its goal of telling a Batman story without Batman, viewers may be left wondering around the fifth or sixth episode of this eight-part series, "Wait, why am I watching a show about the Penguin again?" Grade: B

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.