In just the past couple of years, HBO has paired up the comedy dream team of Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell as Dunk and Egg, brought in Sam Rockwell for a show-stopping White Lotus monologue about sexual exploits in Thailand, and put Bradley Cooper in a Civil War-era Righteous Gemstones prequel episode. The Penguin may have inherited its star from a previous project, but it has one of HBO’s all-time best casts.
The Penguin Was A Pleasant Surprise
Hollywood’s film and TV output has become an endless slew of streaming content spun off from familiar franchises. Not even HBO is immune to it; they’re on their third Game of Thrones spinoff, they’ve turned a bunch of their hit limited series into series series, and they’re planning to spend the next decade remaking every single Harry Potter movie as a season of television.
But there’s been a pleasant pattern in recent years with some of these recycled franchise spinoffs “no one asked for” turning into some of the greatest television masterpieces of the decade. No one asked for a Star Wars show about Cassian Andor, but visionary creator Tony Gilroy turned it into the definitive cinematic statement on the cost of revolution.
When Oz Cobb, Colin Farrell’s side villain from The Batman, was announced to be getting his own spinoff series, it seemed like another show “no one asked for.” But whether it turned out to be an unexpected gem like Peacemaker or a disaster like The Book of Boba Fett depended entirely on the creator that HBO put at the helm. Fortunately, they found the perfect showrunner in Lauren LeFranc.
Like Gilroy, LeFranc is much more interested in telling a good story with timely themes than expanding a fictional universe and playing with the studio’s action figures. When she signed on to write The Penguin, she was more excited by the idea of a Scarface-style criminal character study than the opportunity to pad out Matt Reeves’ Gotham with C-list Batman villains.
The Penguin looks at three key characters in Gotham’s criminal underworld: jaded gangster Oz, recently released mental patient Sofia, and aimless orphan Victor. It tells us how they became the way they are, whether they’re beyond redemption, and what they’ll have to do to get there. Their tragic backstories and grim fates tell a complete, rounded story of three deeply flawed individuals impacting each other’s lives.
The Penguin Is Carried By A Stacked Ensemble Cast
Colin Farrell stole the spotlight every time he showed up in The Batman, but he only popped up in a small handful of scenes in that movie, usually as the dark comic relief. In The Penguin, he expands that character into every bit the complex, three-dimensional figure that Tony Soprano is.
And Farrell is just one of the incredible actors in this show. Cristin Milioti is deeply sympathetic and endlessly watchable as Sofia; Rhenzy Feliz is the moral center of The Penguin as Vic; Mark Strong ably replaces John Turturro as Carmine Falcone; and Clancy Brown plays yet another DC role (after all his voiceovers in the DC Animated Universe) as his gangland rival, Sal Maroni.
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