The Penguin (HBO, 2024) is not a superhero show. It is a crime drama that happens to wear a cape-world costume. Set in the immediate aftermath of The Batman (2022), it follows Oz Cobb clawing his way to the top of Gotham's underworld after the Maroni family collapses. What fans love is the texture: the corner-store power plays, the brutal family loyalty, Sofia Falcone's cold-blooded return, and Colin Farrell disappearing so completely into prosthetics and mannerism that you forget an actor is there at all. The through-line is ambition as addiction, the cost of becoming the person you have to become to survive. If that combination of prestige-TV craft, crime-family politics, and morally irredeemable protagonists pulls you in, the titles below span every medium that does it right.
Essential The Penguin
Start here: the show and its cinematic home
Crime Families and Power Vacuums
TV series built on the same ruthless hierarchy
Street-Level Crime Films
Movies where the city itself is a character
Games with Gotham DNA
Play the underworld from the inside
Scores for a Rainy Night in Gotham
Music that carries the same noir pressure
Colin Farrell Does the Work So the Character Can
Transformative prosthetics are a gimmick when the performance underneath is hollow. Here, Farrell builds Oz from scratch: the limp, the smirk, the practiced warmth that curdles on cue. The show earns its prestige label because the physical transformation never substitutes for the psychological one. By episode four you stop seeing a costume and start seeing a man who genuinely cannot stop.
Sofia Falcone Is the Real Protagonist
Cristin Milioti's Sofia enters the season as a loose variable and ends it as the show's moral and dramatic center. The writing gives her a backstory of institutional horror (Arkham Asylum, her father's cruelty) that explains without excusing every choice she makes. The best scenes belong to her. If a second season happens, she is the reason.
Prestige Crime TV Has a Continuity Problem
The Penguin works as a standalone story and also as connective tissue for a broader DC universe, two goals that occasionally pull against each other. The best crime dramas (The Wire, The Sopranos) answer to no mythology. Every scene where The Penguin has to nod at what comes next in the Batman canon costs it something. The miracle is how rarely that happens.
Gotham's Criminal History on Screen
- 1989Tim Burton brings Gotham's grotesque underworld to life Batman
- 1992Danny DeVito's Penguin redefines the character as tragic grotesque Batman Returns
- 1992Batman: The Animated Series sets the template for Gotham noir Batman: The Animated Series
- 2004Batman: Year One reaches print as a definitive street-level origin
- 2009Batman: Arkham Asylum launches the gold standard of superhero games Batman: Arkham Asylum
- 2014Gotham (Fox) explores the city before Batman arrives Gotham
- 2022The Batman resets the mythology with noir cinematography and Michael Giacchino's score The Batman
- 2024The Penguin (HBO) delivers eight episodes of prestige crime television in a cape-world setting The Penguin
Crime families and Gotham underworlds
For Fans of The Godfather
Explore the For Fans of The Godfather guide →The best villain stories are really about the price of becoming someone else entirely. Oz Cobb pays it in full.CrossBinge