[COLUMN] The Penguin Understands It's Better When You Mix the Flavors | by Darren Mooney

Note: This article contains spoilers for “After Hours”, the first episode of The Penguin, which is now streaming on Max. And is very good.

Early in “After Hours”, the opening episode of The Penguin, teenager Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) finds himself driving the sportscar owned by Oswald Cobb (Colin Farrell). Vic had been trying to steal the rims off the car, when Oz caught him. For his part, Oz was in the middle of covering up his impulsive murder of mob failson Alberto Falcone (Michael Zegen). Oz conscripts Vic into this criminal conspiracy, while Vic remains keenly aware of precisely how expendable he is in this situation.

As the pair drive through Gotham late at night, Oz makes small talk. Noting that Vic is from the same part of the city as him, he muses about the neighborhood. In particular, he remembers the small corner store, Buddy’s. “They still sell those Slush Puppies?” Oz wonders aloud. Recalling the summer days when he and his brothers would drink the chilled beverages, he asks Vic, “You ever mix the flavors?” When Vic, still clearly freaking out, admits that he has not, Oz replies, quite saddened, “You missed out.”

This is a nice character moment for Oz, an expression of the character’s voracious appetite and his clear desire for more. It is also, perhaps, a sly acknowledgement of the character’s lack of respect for the conventional boundaries of good taste. When Alberto’s sister Sofia (Cristen Milioti) describes Oz’s garish sportscar as purple, Oz is quick to correct her, “Technically it’s plum.” However, this mixing of flavors is also something of a mission statement for The Penguin itself, and what makes it such a good show.

The Penguin is a spin-off from Matt Reeves’ The Batman. The show opens in the immediate aftermath of that movie, with a quick newsreel serving to bring viewers up to speed on everything that happened. The plot is motivated by the power struggle that emerges in the wake of the murder of crime boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro, Mark Strong), as the underworld power players scramble to fill the vacuum. The show ends with Oz “ready to join” The Batman, Part II.

However, The Penguin stands out because it’s not just a brand extension. Its influence extends beyond the movies that it is sandwiched between. Showrunner Lauren LeFranc has described The Penguin as “a Scarface story.” This is a fairly logical point of reference. Oz is a physically disfigured gangster who aspires to ascend from the gutters to the heights of the criminal underworld, and is willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.

That said, there is a much more obvious influence on The Penguin. As a HBO show about the mob, The Penguin was always going to invite comparisons to The Sopranos. Like Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), Oz is introduced as a midlevel gangster effectively managing the logistical side of a criminal organization for the older and out-of-touch generation. Both shows are very modern and knowing takes on the tropes of the classic mob story, demonstrating a playful self-awareness.

Both Oz and Tony have a great deal of affection for the Golden Age of Hollywood, nostalgic for a version of organized crime that never existed while playing against clichés of a certain form of masculinity. While Tony Soprano might wax lyrical about Gary Cooper, Oz’s taste in classical movies leans more towards Gilda. While Tony might cry listening to the Chi-Lites, it turns out that Oz is much more of a Dolly Parton person. Both shows share a sly and wry sense of humor.

The Penguin leans even further into this comparison across the eight-episode season, but in the opening episode the overlap is most pronounced in Oz’s relationship with his mentally ill mother Frances (Deirdre O'Connell). Frances is controlling and demanding, while Oz is simultaneously devoted to and exasperated by her, recalling the central dynamic between Tony and his mother Livia on The Sopranos (Nancy Marchand).

These similarities have not gone unnoticed. Reviews for The Penguin have described it as a “stealth Sopranos sequel” and “a slightly more absurd version of The Sopranos”, noting that there is “something of Scorsese or The Sopranos” to the series. These similarities were not accidental. “We look at the gangsters,” explained producer Dylan Clark. “We are constantly looking at The Sopranos going, ‘Oh my God, this is what Tony Soprano did here. Maybe there’s a version of it for us.’”

This is a good thing. The Sopranos is generally agreed to be one of the finest television shows ever produced. It helped to kickstart “the Golden Age of Television” and paved the way for a generation of “difficult men” on era-defining shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Deadwood and Boardwalk Empire. It’s just good taste to want a gangster show to exist in conversation with The Sopranos. It demonstrates that The Penguin can look beyond lore or fanservice.

There is a knee jerk reaction in certain corners of comic book media fandom that treats the mere acknowledgement of anything outside the framework of the existing comic book material to suggest that such adaptations are “embarrassed” or “ashamed” to be superhero stories. It’s a topic that has come up recently in the context of name changes. The Penguin changes the character’s surname from Cobblepot to Cobb. In Joker: Folie á Deux, Harleen Quinzel (Lady Gaga) goes by “Lee.”

Frankly, this is a wild criticism to make as a large percentage of mainstream blockbuster fare, particularly superhero media, consists of uncut weapon-grade fan service. There are plenty of comic book adaptations where people who are obsessed with lore can wager on when Mephisto is going to show up or revel in how terrible a costume designed for four-color printing looks in live action. There are entire shows and movies built around in-jokes, allusions and references to comic book lore.

And, to be clear, there is not necessarily anything wrong with that sort of insular fanservice in moderation. However, there is a tendency towards any form of media that concentrates so much of its gaze inwards to grow insular. When comics book legend Grant Morrison effectively rebooted Marvel’s flagship X-Men title at the turn of the millennium, they argued (quite rightly) that the book had become stale, “turned inwards and gone septic like a toenail.”

Adaptations have always made changes to comic book characters. Some of those fade into memory, and others imprint on the source material. Was Batman ’66 “ashamed” of its source material when it rebranded the classic Batman villain Mister Zero as “Mister Freeze” (George Sanders)? Was Batman: The Animated Series “embarrassed” by the comics when it opted to finally give Mister Freeze the civilian name Victor Fries (Michael Ansara)?

Such arguments would be fundamentally ridiculous, and would deprive audiences of the beloved episode “Heart of Ice”, which is one of the best Batman stories in any medium and which effectively elevated Mister Freeze to the middle rungs of Batman’s rogues gallery. There is a solid argument that one of the reasons why Batman endures as one of the most popular and beloved characters in popular culture is because this adaptability is a feature, not a bug.

To be fair, there is a sense that even the most “faithful” comic book movie makers understand this. For more than a decade, many Marvel Studios films have been pre-packaged with references to genres outside of the traditional superhero film. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was apparently “a political thriller.” Ant-Man was “a heist movie.” Spider-Man: Homecoming was “a John Hughes movie.” Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was “a martial arts movie.” And so on.

In reality, there is a pervasive sameness to those movies, right down to the color correction and the soundtracks. The production machine pushes so many of these superhero projects towards a bland and homogenized template. When Marvel Studios came to television with WandaVision, it was almost an invasion – the studio bending the conventions and the language of the medium towards the company’s assembly-line narrative conventions. It all ends in color-coded power blasts. No wonder audiences are tired; it’s all the same, and there is so much of it.

In contrast, many of the best and most successful Batman adaptations demonstrate an interest beyond allusions to the comic books. Before shooting Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan made his entire production team watch Blade Runner. The Dark Knight is so heavily indebted to Heat that it features William Fichtner in a very similar role to the one he played in that movie. Nolan also borrows shots and images from Michael Mann’s Thief. There is style, texture and curiosity.

It isn’t just Nolan, to be clear. Matt Reeves’ The Batman owes a lot to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation or David Fincher’s se7en and Fight Club. Todd Phillips’ Joker evokes Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, while Phillips encouraged the crew to watch Chantal Akerman’s documentary News from Home. These are honest and committed homages to classic cinema, and they place these comic book characters in conversation with the history of Hollywood.

This, incidentally, is truer to the spirit of the comics than any clumsy shoehorning of a particular costume or image to the screen completely removed from its original context. Many of the classic comic books were influenced by Hollywood. Marvel created characters like Blade, Luke Cage, the Immortal Iron Fist and Shang-Chi in response to trends of the era. The Joker is modelled on Conrad Veidt’s appearance in the 1928 silent movie, The Man Who Laughs.

These references can be cyclical. Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Reeves’ The Batman (and LeFranc’s The Penguin) owe much to Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s beloved miniseries The Long Halloween. That comic is very obviously influenced by Coppola’s The Godfather, to the point that its opening line is “I believe in Gotham City” in allusion to “I believe in America.” Nolan, Reeves and LeFranc are just updating that frame of reference, from The Godfather to Heat, The Conversation and The Sopranos.

These choices are thoughtful and literate. They don’t reflect embarrassment at the source material, but respect for the influences upon it and the context in which it originally existed. Even something like Phillips’ invocation of Taxi Driver in Joker exists in the context of Frank Miller’s and David Mazzucchelli’s allusion to the same film in their iconic Year One comic. Comic books are pop art, and they exist in conversation with more than just their own continuity.

Like hip hop, comics are an artform built on sampling and remixing various facets of pop culture. Curiosity is a good thing, keeping these properties fresh and dynamic. After all, fans have no shortage of Batman projects to enjoy, of a variety of tones: Kite-Man: Hell Yeah!, Batman: The Caped Crusader and Merry Little Batman all came out in the past twelve months. It’s perfectly healthy to have a Batman television series that takes its cues from one of the best shows ever made.

In the closing moments of “After Hours”, Oz and Vic sit in the street, enjoying Slush Puppies after a hard day at work. “It’s better, right?” Oz presses Vic, as the camera rests on this new dynamic duo. “When you mix the flavours?” Vic concedes, “Yeah, it’s good.” Oz replies, “It’s not just good. It’s better. It’s the fucking best.” Oz is right. The Penguin is proof that, when you mix the flavors, it’s the fucking best.