The Penguin (2024) Review: Colin Farrell Owns Every Scene

🦇 This review is part of the DC Elseworlds – explore the standalone Batman and Joker films.

When The Penguin arrived on HBO in September 2024, it came with a specific expectation burden: take a supporting character from a three-hour Batman film and prove, across eight television episodes, that he was always the most interesting person in the room. Two years after The Batman (2022) gave Colin Farrell approximately twenty minutes under four hours of prosthetic make-up, The Penguin gave him eight hours to show what Oz Cobb actually is.

He delivers. Completely.

What surprised me — watching this as someone who rated The Batman a solid 7 and moved on — is that The Penguin made me realise I had underestimated the world Matt Reeves built. The flooded Gotham of the film felt like scenery. In The Penguin, it feels like a living city in crisis, with specific political geography, specific criminal infrastructure, and the specific texture of a place where institutional collapse has left ordinary people bearing the cost of extraordinary malfeasance.

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The Setup: A City in the Power Vacuum

Carmine Falcone is dead. The Riddler’s flood has displaced tens of thousands of Gotham residents. The criminal infrastructure of the city’s dominant crime family has fractured, with no clear successor. And Oz Cobb — mid-level Falcone soldier, self-made man, lifelong underestimate — sees his moment.

The Penguin is, at its core, a classic crime drama structure: the man at the bottom who wants to reach the top, navigating a world where loyalty is always conditional and alliances are always temporary. What gives it distinction is the dual protagonist structure. Because parallel to Oz’s climb, Sofia Falcone — Carmine’s daughter, who spent years in Arkham Asylum after her father had her committed — arrives in Gotham to reclaim what she considers rightfully hers.

Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone is the series’ genuine discovery. A character who could have been a standard mob rival — tough, calculating, dangerous — becomes instead a fully realised portrait of what happens when a brilliant person is defined entirely by the damage others inflicted on them. Sofia’s motivation is not simply power; it is legitimacy — the specific validation of a father who always chose the wrong child, pursued in his absence with a thoroughness that borders on obsession.

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The show’s most impressive structural achievement is episode five, told almost entirely from Sofia’s perspective — a single extended sequence that reframes her entire arc and makes her simultaneously more threatening and more sympathetic. It is one of the best single episodes of television produced in 2024. It also, retrospectively, makes every prior scene she appears in richer.

The Colin Farrell Effect

Farrell has said publicly that playing Oz Cobb required him to relearn how to walk, to move, to occupy space. The prosthetics change his face completely — the Ireland’s most charming leading man is gone, replaced by a heavy-jowled, limping, middle-aged Gotham hustler — but the performance inside them changes his gravity in ways that have nothing to do with the appliances.

What Farrell finds in Oz is a very specific social resentment: the anger of someone who has spent his entire career being underestimated by people who were born into positions he had to earn. It is in every interaction with Sofia — born to everything Oz covets. It is in every conversation with the crime family heirs who treat him as staff. It is in the specific care he extends to the few people in his life who treat him as human.

The dangerous thing about Oz Cobb is not that he is violent — though he is, when he calculates violence is required. The dangerous thing is that he is smart, patient, and motivated by a resentment that the show never lets you dismiss as simple villainy. By episode four, I was invested in his success at things I should have been actively opposing. That is the craft of the series working exactly as intended.

Gotham After the Flood

The production design of The Penguin is the most specific and fully inhabited version of Matt Reeves’ Gotham the franchise has produced. The post-flood Gotham — displaced populations in temporary housing, criminal power vacuums exploited by anyone with sufficient organisation, city services stretched to breaking — is a setting with real political texture.

This specificity matters for what the show is doing. The Penguin is not just a crime drama about who controls Gotham. It is a crime drama about what happens when an already-broken city breaks further. The tent cities, the flooded boroughs, the organised crime filling the infrastructure gaps left by incompetent and corrupt civic governance — these are not background decoration. They are the argument.

Lauren LeFranc’s showrunning keeps eight episodes moving with zero wasted space. There is no filler episode, no detour that doesn’t pay off, no character introduced without purpose. The mob dynamics are intricate — multiple competing factions, shifting alliances, historical grievances surfacing at strategic moments — but the show never loses clarity about who wants what and why.

Watching Context

Eight episodes at 50-60 minutes each — this is approximately eight hours of dense, carefully plotted television. It is not background viewing. The plotting rewards attention; the character work rewards engagement. This is a weekend marathon or a deliberate five-night watch.

On Vision Pro: the production design translates beautifully to immersive display. Dark Gotham interiors, neon-lit rain, the texture of post-flood urban decay — all rendered in HBO’s typically excellent production quality. Farrell’s prosthetic work in extreme close-up is extraordinarily detailed; the Vision Pro gives you full access to the craftsmanship. The sound design is spatial and specific throughout.

Practical note for dads: this is adult crime television in the HBO tradition. Children, babysitters, and anyone who doesn’t want to watch a man get their throat cut in a car park should not be in the room. Partners who enjoy The Wire, Succession, or crime drama generally will likely find this excellent.

Do I need to watch The Batman before The Penguin?

Recommended but not strictly required. The Penguin picks up immediately after The Batman and features several returning characters. The flooded Gotham geography, the Cobb and Falcone backstory, and specific references to the film all land with greater weight if you have seen The Batman first. The Penguin introduces its world clearly enough that cold viewers can follow, but the series rewards prior context significantly.

How many episodes is The Penguin (2024)?

Eight episodes, each approximately 50-60 minutes. A complete, contained first season with no wasted episode. It tells a closed story — Oz Cobb’s rise and the Falcone succession war — while opening possibilities for further seasons in the Matt Reeves Gotham universe.

Who plays Oz Cobb in The Penguin?

Colin Farrell, under four hours of prosthetic make-up per day. Farrell is physically unrecognisable — the transformation is one of the most complete character rebuilds in recent television. Inside the prosthetics, he delivers a career-best performance built around working-class resentment and strategic intelligence.

Is The Penguin on Netflix or HBO?

The Penguin is an HBO original series, streaming on Max in the US and via Sky Atlantic in the UK and Germany. It is not on Netflix.

Is The Penguin suitable for kids?

No. TV-MA rating — graphic violence, mob executions, strong language, and thematically mature crime drama. This is adult television in the HBO tradition. Not appropriate for children; challenging for most teenagers under sixteen.