The Penguin – After Hours Review

As someone who never got around to watching Matt Reeves 2022 take on the caped crusader The Batman (you know, the one with Robert Pattinson taking on the titular role in a darker, less polished version of the character), I was worried that I would be a tad lost when I sat down to sample The Penguin, a series about – you guessed it – Oswald Cob (not Cobblepot this time around), a lieutenant in the Falcone crime syndicate within Gotham City. But you know what? Despite not knowing much about this particular take on Gotham – the series does open with a quick newsreel that fills us in on the basics of The Batman – and knowing that this series – like a shocking number of Gotham-set or adjacent DC TV series over the last 25 year – doesn’t actually contain Batman (or Bruce Wayne), I found myself strangely charmed with the aesthetic and the central pairing of the Penguin (Colin Farrell, reprising his role from the film) and Sofia “The Hangman” Falcone (Cristin Milioti) in this mobster-filled, crime drama.

Let’s get the most obvious issue folks are going to have with this series out of the way right out of the gate: Farrell and Milioti’s performances are A LOT. Like, this duo is competing to see who can chomp the most scenery at any given time in the story. Couple that with some wobbly writing at times (there are only so many phrases one can use when dealing with New York City Italian gangsters without hitting on some rough patches that evoke some stronger, classic stories), and The Penguin is definitely not a perfect show. But it is an interesting one. Circling back to those at times broad performances (complete with some strong accents to boot), and I can absolutely see that this isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Yet, just when I was about to write this one off as a skip it – that would be at the start of the dinner between Oz and Sofia, mid-way through the episode – something happened that hooked me.

You see, for all their scenery chewing, both Farrell and Milioti are taking their performances seriously. Deadly seriously. Because when you let the audience think your character is one-note – say, a slightly crazy woman just returned from Arkham trying to find her missing brother and going about it by sending goons to capture a former lieutenant of her recently deceased father and tying him naked to a chair to torture him into confessing – Milioti allows Sofia to fall silent. To let us look into her eyes and see that there’s a heck of a lot more going on with her under the surface. That sure, she might be brash and loud and maybe a tad mad, but she’s also smart and understands the game she’s playing. Same goes for Farrell in his work as Oz. There’s an outward performance – the fat suit, the limp, the accent – and then there’s his eyes. You see him thinking through his potential moves. You watch him trying to figure out how he can get out of the latest situation he finds himself in (often of his own making). There’s layers to each of these characters baked in from the drop – something that is easily missed when you only watch their flashy outward performances.

As for the story and the world itself, well, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before in a mob story. We’re in Gotham, but it’s even more clearly New York City than it usually is when dealing with a Batman-adjacent tale. We have our two sides – the Falcone and Maroni crime families (names familiar to fans of Batman, as both are staples of the Gotham underworld), fighting to fill the power vacuum left with the death of the Falcone patriarch, Carmine (who will be played in the series by Mark Strong in flashbacks, although John Turturro played the role in the film). So, while the story isn’t all that special – do we really need to spend multiple episodes looking at how The Penguin rose through the ranks in Gotham to become a true threat to Batman? – the central performances of Milioti and Farrell so far help elevate what could be a relatively rote story into something more. And, it doesn’t hurt that the supporting cast is pretty spectacular. In this episode we got to see Michael Zegen (most recently seen in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) as the now-dead Alberto Falcone, Deirdre O’Connell (a spectacular stage actress) as Oz’s mother, and Clancy Brown (who is always a welcome addition to any show he appears in) as the imprisoned mob boss Salvatore Maroni. Plus, Rhenzy Feliz was excellent as Vic, Oz’s teenage driver and enforcer.

When you have a cast that understands the assignment – elevate what could be cheesy, genre writing and storytelling to something that isn’t just another DC story without our real hero – it takes a series that could just be yet another Gotham story and makes it into a strange, interesting look at a facet of the Batman universe that often gets pushed aside in favor of more flashy villainy. Sure, we hear a lot about the Gotham mobsters – and they often align with one of Batman’s Rogues Gallery members in the fight – but it’s rare to really get to see just how these smaller-time villains operate. Just what the real action on the ground in Gotham is. So far, The Penguin is allowing us to see that side of the tale, with some really interesting performances to keep us invested in a story that might not feel totally new.