For much of my youth, I remained unaware that I was, in fact, a DC Comics fan. I never picked up a comic book until my twenties, yet I was enthralled by Tim Burton’s Batman films. My appreciation for the Caped Crusader reached its apex with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, a saga that, at the time, seemed to redefine what a comic book adaptation could achieve. More than a decade later, HBO’s The Penguin—a ferocious, eight-episode crime epic—delivers a similar revelation. This is Gotham: a city rotting from the inside out, where ambition is currency and brutality is the cost of doing business.
The series follows Oswald "Oz" Cobb, a mid-level enforcer clawing his way up the criminal food chain in the power vacuum left by Carmine Falcone’s death. Colin Farrell, unrecognizable beneath layers of prosthetics, gives a performance so transformative, so immersive, that it demands mention alongside some of the great chameleonic turns in film and television—John Hurt in The Elephant Man, …
