Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Penguin’ On HBO, Where Oz Cobb Schemes His Way To Power In Gotham City’s Underworld

At the end of The Batman, The Riddler was committed to Arkham and most of Gotham was flooded after the retaining walls around the city were blown up. The new limited series The Penguin takes place about a week after the events of that film, with a vacuum in the leadership of Gotham’s biggest crime family and someone ready to fill that gap.

THE PENGUIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As news about explosions along Gotham’s seawall play out, as well as news about the assassination of crime boss Carmine Falcone, Oswald “Oz” Cobb (Colin Farrell) looks out the window of his apartment.

The Gist: Oz, heavily disfigured with a severe limp that makes him waddle like a penguin, was a top lieutenant of Falcone’s. It’s assumed that Carmine’s son Alberto (Michael Zegen) will take over, but for now there’s a power vacuum in Gotham’s underworld.

Oz goes to the Falcone club and finds a file full of dirt about various Gotham officials as well as Falcone organization bigwigs like underboss Johnny Vitti (Michael Kelly). Alberto finds Oz there; Oz gives him jewelry that Carmine collected over the years — including a ring from rival crime boss Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown). Oz offers Alberto, a noted addict, “drops,” but Alberto wants to keep his head on straight in preparation for a big shipment that will start a new drug venture for the family.

But Oz, ever prickly, ends up doing something he regrets, and now he has to get rid of a body. When he sees a group of kids trying to take the rims off his purple Maserati, he recruits one of them, Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz), to help him move that body. His intention is to kill Victor as soon as the body is moved, but the teen tells Oz that he can be useful.

Even though the floods damaged production of “drops,” which Oz has been in charge of for years, the factory is still going. But Vitti calls him to the Falcone mansion to tell him that the factory is being closed down and moved to a suburb. Oz tries to convince Vitti that he’s making a mistake, but to no avail.

At the same time, Alberto’s sister Sofia (Cristin Milioti), fresh out of Arkham, shows up and asks Oz if he knows where her brother is. Oz knows Sofia well, and knows that she’s relentless and shouldn’t be messed with, so he has to hatch a plan to let her know what happened to Alberto without implicating himself in the process. In the meantime, he goes to the local prison to try to negotiate a deal with Maroni, in order to protect his own interests.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Penguin takes place about a week after the events of The Batman.

Our Take: In The Penguin, showrunner Lauren LeFranc has maintained the same dark and gritty vision of Gotham that Matt Reeves established in The Batman, but what makes the show different than most other gritty DC Comics adaptations are the performances of Farrell and Milioti, both riveting in different ways.

Farrell completely disappears into the makeup and “fat suit” he uses when playing Oz, but the performance stands out for more than just its physicality. Oz is a guy who can be viciously violent, especially in response to being disrespected, but there’s a sadness inside that isn’t far from the surface. When he talks to Vic about mixing flavors of Slush Puppy drinks when he was a kid, you know that he longs to be someone other than this deformed gangster, but at this point his fate has long been determined.

On the other hand, Milioti is cold and measured as Sofia. Knowing that she’s recently been institutionalized in Arkham tells us immediately what she’s capable of. But as soon as Milioti appeared, her dead-eyed queries about Alberto gave us chills, as did her animalistic eating habits when she took Oz out to a fancy restaurant. She is obviously going to be Oz’s nemesis in this series, and her calm sociopathy is a fun contrast to Oz’s calculated but rough way of doing things.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Oz and Vic enjoy mixed-flavor Slush Puppies in Oz’s old neighborhood as “9 to 5” plays (It was on the CD player in the Volvo Oz stashes in the ‘burbs).

Sleeper Star: Deirdre O’Connell plays Oz’s mom Diedre, and she’s equally disturbed and cognitively compromised.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Sofia lightly criticizes Oz for his purple car, he corrects her and says it’s called “Plum.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Penguin is compelling because of the very different but equally riveting performances of Ferrell and Milioti.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.