The Penguin Review: Colin Farrell Owns HBO’s Batman Spinoff

The Penguin is not really a superhero show. Set in the aftermath of Matt Reeves’s The Batman, this eight-episode limited series is a Gotham City crime drama in the tradition of The Sopranos and Scarface, following Oz Cobb’s ruthless climb from mid-level gangster to crime lord. Colin Farrell, unrecognizable under transformative prosthetics, delivers a performance of such depth and menace that you forget you are watching a comic book adaptation entirely.

How We Reviewed: Our assessment is based on analysis of writing, direction, and ensemble performance and comparison with the show’s prior seasons and genre benchmarks. Ratings reflect full-season viewing, critical analysis, and production quality assessment. No sponsorship or affiliate relationship influenced our selections.

Oz Cobb’s Rise

The series picks up after the flooding of Gotham City, with the Falcone crime family in chaos following Carmine Falcone’s death. Oz — do not call him Penguin — sees opportunity in the power vacuum. A limping, overweight, outer-borough hustler with a gift for manipulation and zero moral boundaries, Oz begins his ascent by playing every faction against each other while positioning himself as indispensable to all of them.

Farrell’s performance is a revelation. Beneath the prosthetics, he creates a fully realized character: charming when he needs to be, terrifying when crossed, and fundamentally lonely in a way that explains his desperate need for power without excusing a single thing he does. The physicality alone is impressive — the limp, the posture, the way Oz’s body language shifts depending on his audience — but it is the emotional detail that makes the performance great. A scene where Oz visits his mother in a care facility reveals the wounded child beneath the monster, and Farrell plays it without a trace of sentimentality.

Sofia Falcone

Cristin Milioti is the season’s secret weapon as Sofia Falcone, the Falcone heir recently released from Arkham Asylum. Milioti plays Sofia as a woman whose trauma has been weaponized by the very family that inflicted it, and her arc from victim to predator is the show’s most compelling storyline. Her scenes with Farrell vibrate with mutual distrust and grudging respect, and Milioti matches him beat for beat. Her performance earned universal acclaim for good reason — it is one of the year’s best.

Gotham as Character

The show’s Gotham City is a character in itself — rain-soaked, flood-damaged, corrupt at every level. The production design extends the noir-drenched aesthetic of The Batman while grounding it in recognizable urban decay. The nightclubs, the back rooms, the crumbling infrastructure of a city that was barely functional before the disaster — every location tells a story about inequality and institutional failure.

Showrunner Lauren LeFranc keeps the focus tight. There are no superhero cameos, no Bat-Signal appearances. This is a street-level crime story, and the restraint allows the characters and their power dynamics to drive every scene. The pacing mirrors classic crime dramas — patient in the early episodes, increasingly propulsive as alliances fracture and the body count rises.

The Supporting Cast

Rhenzy Feliz is effective as Victor Aguilar, a young man from the flooded Narrows whom Oz takes under his wing as a protege. Their mentor-student relationship provides the show’s most human moments and its most chilling ones, as we watch Oz corrupt Victor’s decency in real time. Michael Kelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo, and Deirdre O’Connell all contribute strong supporting work.

Verdict

The Penguin is an exceptional crime drama that happens to be set in the DC universe. Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti deliver performances that would anchor any prestige drama, and the show’s commitment to treating its comic book source material with the seriousness of a Scorsese film pays enormous dividends. This is what comic book television can be when the focus is on character rather than spectacle.

Rating: 8.5/10

For more comic book adaptations, see our ranking of the Best Comic Book Shows Streaming and our review of Agatha All Along.