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The series premiere of HBO’s The Penguin aired on Friday, and despite avoiding the politicization that befell many high-profile productions in recent years, the show is poorly written and lame. Neither the show’s reasonably high production values nor Colin Farrell’s highly amusing performance as the titular character were able to overcompensate for the garbage quality of the storytelling.
In the infantile American culture, which has become obsessed with media derived from children’s comic books, creators interested in dealing with more mature material have looked for comic book settings in which to fit their stories. The best example of this thus far is 2019’s Joker, which was a well-done film dealing with mature themes within the trappings of comic book characters. Three years later, The Batman drew inspiration from Joker, and attempted to tell a gritty crime drama using characters from comic books. While The Batman was not a great film, it was visually stimulating and did a great job at creating a tone of dark surrealism.
The reason The Penguin, a sequel to the 2022 Batman film, fails is that it tries too hard to be a gritty and hardboiled crime drama, while being written by people who do not understand the genre. While The Batman could use the absurdity of people running around in suits to smooth over some of the problems in the ostensibly realist story they were trying to tell, The Penguin, seemingly out of embarrassment, refuses to lean into the comic book source material.
Whether or not one enjoys comic book stories is a matter of taste, but it is a valid form of storytelling. Superhero-related comic book stories tend to not be particularly focused on portraying realism, instead involving large doses of suspension of disbelief. The stories not only include people in costumes running around fighting one another, but also usually have a layer of science fiction and fantasy. The characters are typically extreme and do not resemble humans who you would imagine existing in the real world. When you combine this genre with “gritty realism,” you end up with a kind of surrealism, which can work, and did work in Joker, The Batman, and before that, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
If instead of being a comic book story, which incorporates elements of realism, you attempt to jettison all of the elements of comic book storytelling and simply use the names of characters from comic books to tell a story grounded in reality, which is what The Penguin does, you are then responsible for telling a believable story that does not require large quantities of the suspension of disbelief. This is why The Penguin fails. The gangster characters and story do not have the believability of gangsters from The Sopranos or a Martin Scorsese film. Everything in The Penguin feels ridiculous, even while the creators are asking you to take it very seriously.
The show begins with Oswald Cobb AKA the Penguin, a high level member of Gotham’s underworld, killing the new boss of the Falcone crime family. He is able to get away with the killing because the two are alone in a closed-down club. We’ve all seen enough films involving organized crime to know that there would never be a situation where two powerful criminals would be meeting without their entourages. However, the writers needed The Penguin to kill Falcone, so they created this unbelievable situation. Following this, The Penguin finds some youths attempting to steal the rims off of his Maserati, and, catching one of the would-be thieves, enlists him to help dispose of the body. This high-level gangster, who is seen later running a large scale mafia operation, just grabs a random teenager off the street for what is presented as the most important job of his life. He goes on to make this random teenager, who he knows nothing about, his right-hand man, within the span of a few hours. This represents the entire tone of the show’s writing. I won’t spoil the story, but it gets progressively worse. The writing is amateurish and dumb, serving only to advance the plot, to move from one scene to another, feeling no responsibility to ground the viewer in the reality of human behavior.
If the show was more willing to lean into the fact that it is based on a comic book, this sort of silly storytelling could have just been brushed over. But the show takes itself incredibly seriously, and reminds you constantly of just how seriously. It only ever breaks frame to depict absurd violence, and it was not clear if this is done with self-awareness or if the cartoonish violence was also meant to be taken with extreme gravity.
In recent years, the decline in writing quality has been covered up in some part by advancements in technology and cinematography techniques, with most of the “premium TV” shows being more spectacle than cinema. While the production values allow for The Penguin to look interesting some of the time, it actually feels somewhat cheap in comparison to other high profile HBO productions. The visuals are definitely not capable of carrying the show.
Some portrayals depict Gotham as a city out of time. In the celebrated Batman: The Animated Series, it is always 1939 in the city, with the buildings, clothing, cars, and technology reflecting that. Joker presented a 1970s Gotham. In keeping with the show’s clear intent to not be a comic book story, there is no attempt to make Gotham City feel like anything other than present-day New York, which is very boring. Gotham is not a real city, and leaning into fantasy could have made the show feel unique. Choosing to make the city otherworldly could have done a lot to mitigate the problems with the storytelling, but the creators missed that opportunity.
The single thing that sets the show apart is the fascinating performance by Colin Farrell as the Penguin, but this is not enough to overcome the problems in the show’s writing. One is simply left with regret that Farrell’s performance was wasted on such mediocre writing. However, the character of the Penguin might make the show worth some people’s time, because that part is fun.
Although the show avoids “woke” type storytelling, it’s notable that it was largely written by women. This is not at all surprising, considering its inability to tackle the traditionally masculine domain of gangster cinema. Lauren LeFranc is listed as creator and show-runner, and she wrote the first episode. There are a lot of other female names on the list of writers and producers, to the point where it appears the hiring process was an exercise in female empowerment.
The show is scheduled for eight episodes to air on Sundays, and it is possible that the quality could improve, though that seems unlikely. Without Colin Farrell’s performance, the show would be a solid 2/10. Farrell gives it a couple of extra points, pushing it up to a 4/10, but in my opinion, it remains a waste of time.
