Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti in The Penguin

At the end of The Batman, mob boss Carmine Falcone is dead, leaving behind a power vacuum for control of Gotham City’s criminal underbelly, something the anchors on Gotham’s news channels explain at the beginning of The Penguin, a mini-series set immediately after the events of The Batman. A large chunk of Gotham is still flooded, looting and riots are the order of the day, Batman f-cked off to who knows where, and it’s always f-cking raining. Amidst the chaos and uncertainty, mafia middle-man Oswald Cobb—the Penguin’s name is here reimagined, and it doesn’t sound any less fake than “Oswald Cobblepot”—makes a play for power.

There is a part of me that will always look at Colin Farrell and then look at Oz Cobb as imagined for Matt Reeves’ Bat-verse and wonder why they didn’t just cast someone who already looks kind of like how they want the Penguin to look, but there is another part of me that hugely enjoys Farrell’s performance as the Penguin. A body adjustment suit and one million pounds of facial prosthetics render Farrell completely unrecognizable, and that frees him to give a performance so specific it’s an actual trip to remember there is no one who actually looks like Oz Cobb, that he is entirely a creation of makeup and Farrell’s choices. 

Oz Cobb wears flashy suits and drives a flashy car, talks with an affected 1930s gangster drawl—real “Hey, I’m walkin’ he-ah!” stuff—and has an exaggerated limp that causes him to waddle, undoubtedly the source of the nickname no one is using yet. Despite the grounded realism of The Penguin, which was developed for TV by Lauren LeFranc and matches Matt Reeves’ gloomy, Gothic aesthetic for Gotham City, Colin Farrell is playing Oz Cobb like he is fully a Dick Tracy villain, complete with goofy accent and mannerisms. While watching The Penguin, I kept looking for Flat Top and Mumbles to show up.

Though Farrell plays Oz with an obviousness that means you can see the wheels turning in his head, he isn’t stupid. He’s worked his way up from nothing, and now that Carmine Falcone is dead, he’s playing 4-D chess to rise even further still. Standing in his way, though, is Carmine’s daughter, Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti). Freshly released from Arkham Asylum and with the ominous nickname “the Hangman”, Sofia is a mafia princess discontented with her place on the sideline. 

She’s passed over for control of the family first by her brother, then by her uncle, Luca (Scott Cohen), and she’s talked down to by the men who worked for her father. Sofia is clearly the brains of the family, but no one takes her seriously, except maybe Oz, though The Penguin rapidly sets them up as rivals. Oz is playing all sides against each other, and while most people are content to write off Oz as nothing more than an ass-kisser, Sofia sees something more in him. The question is whether or not she can see ALL of him. 

The Penguin is a mob story about rivals trying to seize power, and its greatest strength is Cristin Milioti. As fun as Farrell is as Oz, whenever Milioti is on screen, there is a real sense of unpredictability and capriciousness that makes The Penguin electric. When she’s off screen, momentum slows and at times, the series even becomes a slog. The besetting sin of The Penguin is the same as many streaming series before it—bloat. There are too many episodes, and they are all too long, but whenever Milioti is on screen, The Penguin lights up with Sofia’s perfect mob wife winter aesthetic and sense of incipient violence.

There are Easter eggs for the nerds, including Theo Rossi popping up as Dr. Julian Rush, but The Penguin works mostly well on its own. The opening moments of episode one use news reports to drop exposition, setting the stage for a soggy Gotham further sundered by mob violence, and from there, The Penguin is a bog-standard mob story, right down to the impressionable youth who gets sucked into Oz’s plans while on his own quest for a better life. The real joy of The Penguin is Cristin Milioti’s performance, and any scene she shares with Farrell, when it really feels like two great actors going for it and leaving nothing on the table. Everything else is too slow and self-important, but when Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti go toe-to-toe, The Penguin soars.