HBO’s The Penguin is the strongest piece of DC television in years, and that’s not a high bar that the show is barely clearing. It’s a high bar the show is clearing comfortably, with eight episodes that together form one of the better mid-prestige cable dramas of the past three TV seasons.
The show launched September 19, 2024 on HBO and Max. Colin Farrell returns as Oswald Cobblepot from Matt Reeves’ 2022 The Batman, in a continuation set in the immediate aftermath of the film. Cristin Milioti plays Sofia Falcone, the show’s other primary lead, in what is genuinely one of the breakout performances of the year.
The premise that works
The structural choice that makes The Penguin work is the absence of Batman. The show takes place in Reeves’ Gotham but pushes the Bat character entirely off screen. The story is Oz Cobb climbing the Gotham underworld in the power vacuum after Carmine Falcone’s death and the city-flooding events of The Batman’s finale. There is no costumed hero, no aerial confrontation, no detective-mystery throughline. The show commits to crime drama and stays committed.
This works because the Penguin character is much more interesting as a Goodfellas-style mid-tier mob striver than as a comic-book villain to be Batman’s foil. Farrell’s Oz is grasping, insecure, capable of sudden warmth, and capable of sudden brutality. The performance is built on small physical details — Oz’s limp, his cigarette habits, his over-considered politeness when he’s about to do something terrible. The prosthetics work that defined Farrell’s brief appearance in The Batman becomes a sustained character study across eight hours.
Cristin Milioti is the show’s gravity
Milioti’s Sofia Falcone is the show’s narrative axis. Sofia is recently released from Arkham, traumatized by her institutionalization, and reckoning with the patriarchal Falcone family structure that put her there. The performance modulates between grief, calculation, and barely-contained violence with genuine craft. The mid-season episode “Cent’Anni,” which devotes most of its runtime to Sofia’s Arkham backstory, is the strongest single hour of dramatic television DC has produced in years.
Sofia and Oz’s relationship across the season — adversaries, occasional allies, finally enemies — provides the season’s central tension. The show resists giving them a clean romantic or rivalry framing. They are two people in adjacent power struggles whose paths cross with consequences neither can predict.
The supporting cast carries weight
Rhenzy Feliz as Vic Aguilar, Oz’s young protege, gives the show its emotional through-line. Vic is the audience surrogate but not in a passive way — Feliz makes Vic an active participant who develops moral agency across the season. The relationship between Oz and Vic is the show’s most reliable engine, with Oz’s fatherly mentorship sliding repeatedly into manipulative grooming in ways that the show takes seriously.
Deirdre O’Connell as Oz’s mother Francis is the season’s other major performance. Francis appears in the present timeline in deteriorating mental health and in flashback at full force. The dynamic between Oz and Francis explains a substantial portion of who Oz became and is one of the season’s strongest writing achievements.
Clancy Brown’s Salvatore Maroni, the rival mob figure who occupies the season’s first-half antagonist slot, is a textbook example of how to play a character type that could have been generic and make him memorable through specificity.
What the show isn’t
The Penguin is not particularly interested in expanding the Reeves Batman universe in setup-for-future-content ways. There are no Easter eggs for upcoming films. There is no Two-Face setup. There is no Robin tease. The show stays inside its own story and trusts the audience to follow it on its own terms.
For viewers who came in hoping for connective-tissue content for The Batman 2 (currently scheduled for 2026), the show offers very little. For viewers who came in hoping for a self-contained crime drama set in this Gotham, the show offers exactly that.
The eight-episode structure
The pacing is deliberate. The first two episodes are slow, focused on establishing the post-flood Gotham and Oz’s position in the Falcone hierarchy. Episodes three through six escalate steadily. The Sofia-flashback episode (four) slows the pace again for backstory. Episodes seven and eight pay off the season’s setup with sustained intensity.
The finale’s choices are bold. The show commits to consequences that some viewers will find satisfying and others will find devastating. The closing minutes of the eighth episode reframe Oz’s character arc in ways that complicate any easy reading of the season as a redemption story or a corruption story.
Production values
HBO’s production budget is visible across every department. The Gotham streetscapes, the prosthetics work, the costume design (period-undefined but specific), the score by Mick Giacchino — all hit prestige-cable standards. The show looks expensive in the way premium cable used to look expensive routinely and now does only intermittently.
Cinematography across the season is consistently strong. The visual coding of different Gotham neighborhoods reinforces the geographic specificity Reeves’ film established. The color grading subtly distinguishes flashback from present-day without overplaying the contrast.
Score
The Penguin is the strongest piece of comic-book-adjacent television since the early seasons of HBO’s Watchmen, and arguably the strongest crime drama HBO has launched since Boardwalk Empire. Farrell and Milioti’s performances are individually award-tier. The supporting cast holds up. The writing is patient and confident.
For DC fans expecting traditional comic-book storytelling, the show may feel adjacent rather than central. For viewers who want a sustained crime drama set in a recognizable Gotham, this is one of the year’s strongest releases.
9 / 10. The bar for the next Batman-universe TV release just went up substantially.
Reviewed across all eight episodes via Max subscription.