The Penguin: Colin Farrell's Prosthetic Triumph

The Penguin, which ran on HBO from September to November 2024, was the rare superhero-adjacent television product that worked not because of its comic-book inheritance but despite it. Developed by Lauren LeFranc as a spinoff from Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022), the show took Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb, the small-time Gotham gangster from the film, and gave him eight episodes to become a full character.

A year out, this is still the show I point to when asked what prestige television can still do with comic-book material. The answer, apparently, is: a lot, if you stop making it look like comic-book material.

What the show refuses

The smartest decision the show makes, in its first fifteen minutes, is to decline to be a superhero show. Batman never appears. The Riddler is never mentioned. Gotham itself, in the show’s treatment, is a 1970s-coded American industrial city whose specific political economy (corrupt mayoral politics, entrenched crime-family power, collapsing working-class neighbourhoods) is the actual subject of the drama.

The show is, in fact, a crime family saga in the Sopranos tradition, with a specific focus on the American-Italian-immigrant-mafia register. The fact that it happens to be set in Batman’s city is largely incidental to the story it is telling.

This is the right approach for the material. The specific textures of crime-family drama, the long-form character work, the political-economic specificity, are things television does well. The superhero spectacle, with its CGI budgets and its sequel-economy pressures, is not. LeFranc correctly positioned The Penguin as the former rather than the latter.

Colin Farrell, the prosthetic argument

The single most-discussed element of The Penguin at the time of release was Colin Farrell’s prosthetic. Three hours in the makeup chair each morning. A fully reconstructed face that rendered Farrell, visually, completely unrecognisable. The performance was almost universally praised for this fact.

I want to argue that the praise has been attached to the wrong thing. The prosthetic is not the achievement. The achievement is that Farrell is acting at full intensity through the prosthetic, which is a harder thing.

What Farrell does as Oz Cobb is play a man whose entire public self is a construction. Oz has been performing menace, performing competence, performing specific social registers, his whole adult life, and the prosthetic is, in the diegetic reality of the show, part of that performance. Oz has a facial disfigurement in the Batman-universe canon; in the show, he has specifically worked out which version of himself to present to each audience he encounters. Farrell plays the performance of selves through a face that is already, physically, a performance.

The emotional work, particularly in the scenes between Oz and his mother (Deirdre O’Connell), has to travel through all of this construction, and does. Farrell’s eyes, his one exposed expressive instrument through the makeup, carry a remarkable amount of the performance. The scene in episode seven where he has to reckon with his mother’s dementia, I will not spoil the specifics, is the single best piece of screen acting of 2024 through HBO’s slate, a slate that includes several major contenders.

Cristin Milioti, the second argument

If Farrell is the obvious performance, Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone is the other one, and she is carrying at least equal dramatic weight. Sofia is the daughter of the recently-deceased Falcone crime boss; she has spent a decade institutionalised after being falsely framed for her family’s serial murders; she has now returned to Gotham to reclaim her position and destroy her family.

Milioti plays Sofia as a specifically intelligent woman whose trauma has hardened into a specific and clinical rage. The performance is full of choices that push against the easy reading of her character. Sofia is not crazy. Sofia is not broken. Sofia is precise, patient, and terrifyingly capable, and Milioti plays her with the kind of restraint that makes the character’s actual violence land harder when it arrives.

The flashback episode that details how Sofia was framed, which I will not spoil, is the show’s structural masterpiece and one of the best single hours of television of 2024. Milioti’s performance across that hour alone should have won her every limited-series acting award the year offered. She was, largely, passed over. The oversight will look, in five years, like an obvious error.

The Gotham the show built

The Penguin’s production design, by Kalina Ivanov, builds a specific Gotham that is neither the Tim Burton gothic one nor the Christopher Nolan glass-tower one. This is a Gotham of specific working-class Italian and Hispanic neighbourhoods, of specific housing-project geography, of specific bridge-and-tunnel textures. The show’s sense of place is grounded in a version of New York City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia that actually exists.

The flood-damage backdrop, a consequence of the events of The Batman, gives the city a specific recent-trauma weather that the show uses throughout. Gotham is rebuilding and simultaneously falling apart, and the crime-family politics unfold against that specific municipal condition.

Where the show hesitates

My one complaint about The Penguin, on rewatch, is the pacing of the middle three episodes. Episodes four and five, in particular, linger on subplot material (Oz’s relationship with the teenage Victor, played by Rhenzy Feliz; Sofia’s maneuvering inside Arkham State Hospital) that the show could have compressed without loss. The season is eight episodes, which is roughly the right length, but the weight distribution across the episodes is uneven.

This is a small complaint. The opening two episodes and the final three are as strong as any prestige drama of 2024.

Where it sits

The Penguin won Farrell the Emmy for Lead Actor in a Limited Series. The show was not renewed for a second season, partly because the story arc completes within the eight episodes, and partly because Farrell has said publicly that he is unwilling to return to the prosthetic.

I think this is the right call. The show is complete as a limited series. A second season would almost certainly dilute what the first achieved. Matt Reeves’ The Batman Part II is in post-production, and Farrell is confirmed to appear. Whatever that looks like, the television Penguin has done its job and can rest.

Watch the show across two weekends. Pay attention to episode four (the flashback) and episode seven (the mother scene). Those are the hours that matter.