The Penguin is a less pretentious Joker

Doctor Who fans may remember that after the show’s triumphant return in the early 2000s, we found out that showrunner Russell T. Davies had agreed with BBC mandarins to rid the franchise of some of its more unwieldy elements in order to make it palatable to casual viewers.

Gotham City has long been the perfect backdrop for old-fashioned noir, and the city is on fine fettle here

Watching the debut episode of The Penguin, HBO’s new crime series, based on a popular Batman villain, I suspected a similar game was at play. The series might be visibly set in the Batman universe, but it’s also very much detached from the nerdiness that emanates from DC Comics. Think the film adaptation of Joker, only much less pretentious.

For the uninitiated, the titular Penguin is Oswald Cobb, a lumbering and heavy-set mobster who goes from lowly enforcer to becoming one of the most powerful villains in Gotham City. If you’re familiar with the comics, you’ll recognize his name has been trimmed. It used to be Oswald Cobblepot, but evidently HBO felt that even that was risking alienating the normies.

In HBO-land, Cobb is played by the excellent Colin Farrell, reprising the role from a recent Batman film (for reference, there have been five Batman films in ten years, which is even more than the number of Emily Maitlis/Prince Andrew dramas). True to the comic books, Farrell dons a fat suit for the role — leading to silly debates on TikTok as to whether it would have been more progressive to cast an overweight lead instead.

He also wears prosthetics. An awful lot of them, including a large facial scar and all sorts of pockmarks and welts too. The problem is that given everyone else is fresh-faced and good-looking it can be very discombobulating when the camera cuts between Cobb and all the others, as if you’re watching snippets of a different program. At one point, there’s an important scene in a fancy restaurant where Cobb dines with the daughter of a recently dethroned mafia boss. Yet Farrell’s make-up and physiognomy are so outlandishly weird compared with the other diners that it made me think of those old comedy shows (Alf, for example) where an alien inexplicably lives alongside humans.

If you can get past that, then The Penguin is rather good. Gotham City has long been the perfect backdrop for old-fashioned noir, and the city is on fine fettle here. We also get a bit of world-building, with hints of intriguing side-plots — FEMA trucks feeding civilians; a man walking the subway with a QR code promising to reveal the true Gotham — that makes you want to stick around.

As for the main plot, the mob stuff isn’t original, but is nicely done. When we first meet Cobb, he’s shuffling around the apartment of his former boss — a recently executed crime lord, Carmine Falcone, who also hails from the old Batman comics. Our unwieldy antihero senses an opportunity for promotion, but is put in his place by Falcone’s sharp-tongued son (Michael Zegen).

Cobb takes it poorly, as comic book villains typically do, and decides to send Falcone Jnr to reunite with his father. Naturally, the absence of the heir apparent doesn’t go unnoticed, but Cobb concocts a devious scheme to plant the blame at the feet of a rival gang — thus showing the first signs of the intelligence that apparently sets him apart from lesser Batman-botherers like Kite Man and the Crazy Quilt.

Whether the caped crusader himself will show up or not isn’t clear. Maybe he’s been asked to take a backseat, in order to keep the casuals on board. If nothing else, showrunner Lauren LeFranc has clearly taken on another lesson from early-2000s Doctor Who: the most important thing is to keep it fun.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.