Why the Penguin Was the Best Comic Book Show in Years

HBO's The Penguin did something radical with the comic book genre: it made a show about a supervillain that felt more like The Sopranos than the MCU. Colin Farrell disappeared so completely into the prosthetics and mannerisms of Oz Cobb that you forgot you were watching a Batman spinoff. This was a crime drama first, a comic book adaptation somewhere around fifth.

Watch the last twenty minutes of The Batman first. The series starts a week after that film ends, with the Riddler's bombs having breached the seawall and put the Narrows underwater, and none of the geography makes sense without it. What you do not need is any other Batman. He never appears. Eight episodes of a Batman spin-off with no Batman in it, and the show is better for the discipline.

The writing trusted its audience in ways most superhero content does not. There were no gratuitous action sequences to keep the attention-deficient engaged. Instead, the show built tension through dialogue, power dynamics, and the slow escalation of a mob war in Gotham's flooded Narrows district. It was a character study wearing a comic book costume.

Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone was the show's secret weapon. Her performance oscillated between genuine vulnerability and cold-blooded menace with a precision that earned her a Golden Globe. The dynamic between her and Farrell's Oz was the engine of the entire series, two damaged people destroying everything around them in pursuit of power they would never actually enjoy.

The face is Mike Marino's work, not a computer's. Marino's shop, Prosthetic Renaissance, built Oz Cobb out of silicone appliances glued on in sections, roughly three to four hours in the chair before Farrell could start a day's work. Marino did Eddie Murphy's old men in Coming 2 America and Sebastian Stan in A Different Man. The reason it reads as a face rather than a mask is that the pieces move with him: the cheeks compress when he smiles.

Showrunner Lauren LeFranc kept the scale deliberately small. No world-ending threats, no cosmic stakes, no third-act sky beams. The biggest set piece was a car chase through Gotham's streets, and it worked because the show had spent episodes making you care about who was in the car and why they were running. Stakes derived from character, not spectacle.

Episode four is the one to judge it by. Cent'anni leaves Oz almost entirely and spends an hour on how Sofia ended up in Arkham, committed by her own father to bury what he had done, then kept there long enough that the diagnosis became true. It is a self-contained hour that would work with the comic book scaffolding removed completely, which is the most useful thing anyone can say about a superhero property.

The Penguin proved that comic book IP does not have to mean visual noise and narrative shortcuts. It suggested a model where these characters are treated with the same dramatic rigor as any prestige television. Whether the industry actually learns that lesson remains to be seen, but for eight episodes, it was the best argument for taking supervillains seriously.

https://www.hbo.com/the-penguin