C&C 67: The Penguin Lessons

A crime drama worthy of being called epic, plus books by Sara Gran and Bruce Vilanch

I came to HBO’s The Penguin late—hell, the final episode originally aired four months ago—and almost didn’t come to it at all. The limited (?) series is a spin-off of The Batman (2022), a movie I have not seen.¹ So why bother with the ancillary product when I’m unfamiliar with the original?

Two words: Colin Farrell. I will watch the actor in anything, including the pounds of prosthetics he donned to play Oswald ‘Oz’ Cobb, a third-tier gangster who seizes on a power vacuum in Gotham City as a chance to advance in the underworld. I went in with low expectations, figuring I’d take a gander at Farrell in full get-up and that would suffice. I watched the opening scene, with Farrell’s Oz delivering an acting-class-length monologue about Rex Calabrese, the kingpin of his old neighborhood when he was a kid, then turned it off.

But I kept thinking about it. About how Farrell utterly vanished, leaving only a paunchy, balding man who waddles because of a deformed foot—hence the hated nickname, akin to referring to Ben Siegel as ‘Bugsy’²—but how the actor’s eyes, ferocious yet needy, blazed through the make-up. About how his performance seemed to set the pace for the series’ exaggerated tone. I went back and watched the premiere episode, and then the entire run.

No, seriously, that’s Colin Farrell.

That theatrical opening is essential, Oz’s speech laying bare his twinned nostalgia and ambition, containing hints to both his past and his fate. And he’s only delivering this address because he has been caught in a mistake. Oz, we immediately learn, is a habitual fuck-up, a grandiose dreamer whose blunders force him to double down on scheming and betrayal, the pattern paying off in a climax I have been unable to shake.³

The Penguin establishes its independence from The Batman in short order. The Caped Crusader is never mentioned, and only two events from the film matter: crime boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro in the movie, Mark Strong in the series’ flashbacks) is dead, and much of Gotham lies in ruins after the Riddler’s destruction of the city’s seawall. The consequences of this calamity fall disproportionately on the poor and working class, the rich merely inconvenienced. This Gotham is an all-too-believable mix of penthouses and FEMA trailers, a fractured hellscape with every fault line exposed.

Christopher Nolan’s Batman films often harked back to a vintage vision of gangsters to salutary effect; Tom Wilkinson played Carmine Falcone in Batman Begins (2005) as if channeling Edward G. Robinson, a dandy intoxicated by his own power, chewing his dialogue like breadsticks. Farrell’s Oz is in the same mold, dressing for the part he desperately wants to play literally and figuratively. A relentless talker, he wheedles, bullies, and appeals to underdog sentiment, overplaying a weak hand at every turn. No one takes Oz seriously save himself, his naïve protégé Victor (a terrific Rhenzy Feliz), and his mother Francis (the powerhouse Deirdre O’Connell), still formidable despite her diminished capacities. The Oz/Fran relationship is also right out of the old Warner Brothers playbook, a psychological minefield with shades of James Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931) and White Heat (1949) but with the ability to go to much darker places. Oz is gifted with a worthy adversary in Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), Carmine’s daughter and would-be heir, who also may or may not be the serial killer the Hangman. The series’ fourth episode “Cent’Anni” settles the matter in riveting fashion, thanks to both Milioti’s turn and direction by Helen Shaver.⁴

It’s supremely ironic that what could have been a hollow bid to cash in on a mammoth franchise is instead a testament to human creativity in the AI age; no algorithm could synthesize ‘30s crime drama, Dick Tracy, gritty ‘70s thrillers, and a bone-deep pulp sensibility into something as cohesive and potent as what showrunner Lauren LeFranc and her team of collaborators have crafted. Above all, it’s the perfect time for Farrell’s pantheon-level performance as an easily-dismissed buffoon fueled by grievance and given to maudlin populism who somehow, with cockroach resiliency, not only survives but inflicts his stunted vision of the world on enough people that it becomes the place where everyone is forced to live.

What I’m Reading

Little Mysteries, by Sara Gran (2025). Gran’s brilliant and confounding Claire DeWitt is perhaps my favorite contemporary private detective. I was excited to see a collection featuring her along with several Claire-adjacent characters. Even better, all the stories nod toward the children’s mystery books—like the Encyclopedia Brown and Two-Minute Mysteries series, both by Donald J. Sobol—that forged many a crime fiction fan, myself included.⁵ The result is a beguiling, inventive anthology. “Choose Your Own Heartbreak,” featuring teen sleuth Cynthia Silverton, is, as the title implies, inspired by the hugely influential Choose Your Own Adventure series; as it points out, “You may or may not be a fictional character, but that’s true of all of us.” The bifurcated narrative in “The Good Smell of New York City/The Ocean-Salted Air” is the literary equivalent of a Brian De Palma split screen, each half of the tale unfolding in a year plagued by a virus (AIDS in 1988, Covid in 2020) but jointly asking what you owe to the person who saves your life, and to a person whose life you save. Every story is a heartbreaker as well as a welcome reminder that “a mystery is a good reason to stay alive.”

It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, by Bruce Vilanch (2025). How long has Vilanch been toiling as a comedy writer? Long enough that he not only cranked out material for Bob Hope, but Hope even gave him a nickname. The story of that sobriquet is included in this slim memoir about failure, as Vilanch dishes about the many disasters with which he has been involved. And does he have a résumé of regret, spanning film (the Village People “origin story” Can’t Stop the Music [1980], the science-fiction farce The Ice Pirates [1984]), TV (maybe the medium’s most legendary trainwreck, the Star Wars Holiday Special), and Broadway, as well as over a dozen Academy Awards broadcasts including the infamous “Snow White” show of 1989. A little Boomer tetchiness is on display as Vilanch blasts the “keyboard warriors” who insist on digging these flops out of the cursed earth in which they deserve to lie; as Vilanch rightly points out, for the most part these shows and movies were intended to be disposable, forgotten as soon as your Friday night ended. He keeps the laughs coming as he explains how the sausage is made, showing compassion toward his collaborators on these follies. Particularly good is the chapter on The Paul Lynde Halloween Special (1976), now a cult classic, with Vilanch insightful on the difficulties of tailoring a project around “a hot personality in a cool medium” like Lynde.⁶ Maybe Vilanch ought to pen a follow-up about the some of the good stuff he’s done.

1. My relationship with comic-book movies is cordial, but not close. After Avengers: Endgame (2019), I shook hands all around and said, “This has been fun, thanks.” I haven’t watched an MCU movie since. My attendance was spotty before that; I never saw Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), for instance, so I’m not 100% clear on who the Scarlet Witch and Vision are, exactly. That this lack of knowledge never posed a problem is proof of Marvel’s ruthless efficiency.

2. Obligatory plug: Ben Siegel turns up in the third Renee Patrick novel, Script for Scandal.

3. The closing shot manages to be both thrilling and an object lesson in how spin-offs should acknowledge the mothership IP. The finale also features a lovely nod to Burgess Meredith’s interpretation of the character on the 1960s TV series.

4. Shaver, an accomplished TV director, is also the actress from films like The Color of Money (1986) and The Believers (1987).

5. A personal, non-Sobol favorite is 5-Minute Mysteries: Cases from the Files of Ed Noon, Private Eye, aimed at older kids and written by pulp master Michael Avallone. Hey, it’s at Internet Archive!

6. Although I can’t believe that Vilanch wrote about Vincent Price’s appearance on the variety series The Brady Bunch Hour without mentioning Vinny’s run on a multi-episode arc of the original series set in Hawaii, in which his demented archeologist scared the bejesus out of me.