It seems that some penguins can fly after all. Or at least this one can: HBO’s hardbitten Batman spin-off, named after his oily, beaked nemesis, goes into this weekend’s Emmy Awards ceremony with a shot in seven major categories, among them Lead Actor, for Colin Farrell. The team responsible for caking the Irish actor in thick, transformative prosthetics already bagged The Penguin a Creative Arts Emmy last weekend – one of eight technical wins. If there’s often said to be a sort of shlocky, low-prestige sheen to superhero adaptations, it seems someone forgot to tell the voters.
But here’s the rub: The Penguin is really rather good. Centring on the character of Oswald Cobblepot – played gruesomely by Danny DeVito in 1992’s Batman Returns, and here given the fractionally less fanciful name of “Oz Cobb” – the eight-episode series is less a superhero romp than a dark crime melodrama. The writing is taut, the plotting twisty but credible. The Penguin’s Gotham isn’t just a den of moustache-twirling do-badders, but a seedy ecosystem of operators, all with their own complicated motivations. Widespread comparisons to The Sopranos are overflattering, but the ancestry is self-evident: Farrell, unrecognisable both physically and behaviourally in the role of the bulky urban gangster, cuts an almost Gandolfinian figure. Like Tony Soprano, Oz is, at core, a nasty thug with mommy issues.
