I do not have time in my life to watch shows about terrible people doing terrible things to each other. But I do have time for shows in which creative people at the top of their game give me complicated protagonists I can feel sympathy for. And that’s The Penguin.
For those just tuning in, the Penguin is Oswald “Oz” Cobb, a mid-level manager in the organized crime syndicate of Gotham. In The Batman, Oz is a red herring, a name fans will recognize and who will carry the audience through the first hour or so of the picture until the real bad guys are revealed. The film leaves him behind the moment he solves a riddle that both Batman and Alfred have answered incorrectly. When The Batman ends, Gotham is partially flooded and the head of the mob is dead, leaving the city in chaos.
The new show picks up where the film leaves off, with young Alberto Falcone inheriting the family mob business. Colin Farrell introduces us to Oz in the first few minutes, when he reveals to Alberto his innermost desire. Alberto asks Oz, “You think I could be as good as him? [meaning his father] Get his kind of respect?”
Oz answers:
Your father? Sure, Boss. If you want. But there are different kinds of power. When I was kid, there was a gangster, real old-school type, Rex Calabrese. He was a big deal. Yeah. At least, in my neighborhood. He helped people. When someone in your family was sick, he'd find you a doctor. Short on rent, front you the cash. Knew everyone's names, too. I don't know how he kept them all in his head, but... He saw you on the street, he'd call out to you, ask how you were. Felt like he meant it, too. When I'm 14 or something, he has a heart attack and dies, still holding his cigar. In my neighborhood, they throw a parade in his honor. A friggin' parade. I mean, it wasn't fancy, but it was the gesture... the show of love... of what he meant. Can you imagine? To be remembered like that? Revered?
Alberto laughs at Oz for this confession and mocks him. In return, Oz murders him. And then he realizes what he’s done, and the opening credits interrupt the f-bomb that follows.
It’s a great start.
Oz’s confession reveals that he wants to be loved, but that’s not what grabs me about it. What I love about this speech is how it grounds Oz in working class values. There’s a bit in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill explains that people in mob neighborhoods thought of the mob as a resource. A resource made up of very bad men, but a resource nonetheless. The mob offered “protection for the kinds of guys who can't go to the cops.”
Oz is a very violent man, but for him the ultimate prize—the greatest tribute he can think of—is a neighborhood parade thrown for a gangster who loaned people rent money and found them doctors when they were sick. But he’s also a little embarassed by this truth. A protagonist who is embarrassed about his own good qualities is a protagonist I can get into.
The show makes Oz sympathetic in other ways, some subtle and some not so subtle. Oz is disabled. While in the comics and the old TV show, the Penguin earns his name from a combination of affectations including his tuxedo and funny laugh, in this show Oz is called the Penguin because of his rolling waddle-like limp. It’s a brilliant illustration of how TV is different than comics, where depicting a limp is actually very challenging. If you want to show a character limping in a comic, you pretty much have to have someone ask, “Why are you limping?” But in a television show, Farrell can sell that penguin-like limp in an instant. Early in the show, he takes a young kid under his wing and as far as I can tell, the only reason he does not shoot this kid (at first) is because the kid has a stutter. It’s a disability that allows Oz to connect with the kid, to see himself in that kid. All of this is an extended “pet the dog scene,” by which I refer to old Hollywood shorthand in which the writer has to include a scene in every Bogart picture that reveals he’s actually a good guy under all that tough as nails cover.
But my favorite way the show makes Oz sympathetic is through his music tastes. Specifically, Oz has Dolly Parton’s “9-to-5” blaring in his car when he thinks he’s alone, and that’s the tune that the show goes out on over the closing credits. Now, Dolly Parton is an American treasure, and no man who listens to Dolly Parton can be entirely bad. That man is redeemable. But also, the song! Oz is not listening to “Jolene”, or “I Will Always Love You”, or “Hard Candy Christmas”, or any of that shit. He’s listening to “9-to-5”, because he’s a working class guy who was a kid in 1980.
The word “antihero” gets thrown around a lot, but when I say Oz is an antihero I’m using that in a very specific way: an antihero is a character who does the right thing for the wrong reasons. Oz shoots Alberto Falcone not because Alberto is a terrible person who deserved to be shot, which he very well might be, but because Oz felt humiliated and that is something up with which he will not put.
There is much more to say about this show. I have not even gotten to Sofia Falcone, or Clancy Brown (who’s looking better than he has in years!), or Oz’s young protege. But there’s many episodes to go. I’m exited to see them. You might be too.
I enjoyed it and it’s almost unbelievable that that’s Colin Farrell!
I was iffy on watching this, but now I am sold! Thanks for the recommendation.