'The Penguin' waddles onto HBO

When Matt Reeves was preparing his 2022 film The Batman, his sprawling, blockbuster exploration of crime-ridden Gotham City and its hometown vigilante, he would sometimes remark -- half-jokingly and half-not -- that it really needed to be an HBO series.

Reeves, who directed and co-wrote the nearly three-hour movie, felt there were still stories to tell and characters to explore, like Oz Cobb, a midlevel mobster played with foul-mouthed gusto (and pounds of prosthetic makeup) by Colin Farrell.

Although the character appeared in only a few scenes, Reeves said, "There was something electric about Colin. He just completely embodied a spirit that was so fresh and so powerful. You wanted to look at him under a microscope and understand, who is that guy?"

That desire is fulfilled in The Penguin, an HBO series premiering Thursday. Picking up immediately after the events of "The Batman," its eight episodes return to Reeves' grungy incarnation of Gotham while chronicling Cobb's rise to his perch atop the city's empire of organized crime.

The Penguin is an unapologetic bridge to a planned Batman sequel, but it is also trying to use TV to provide something that movies cannot: a longform character study of its crude and wily title character, who is very different from the dapper, top-hat and monocle-wearing bad guy seen in decades' worth of Batman comics.

The Penguin is arriving amid a boom-and-bust cycle of cinematic superhero universes. The Batman was a $772 million-dollar hit for Warner Bros. at the worldwide box office. And while the summertime success of Disney's Deadpool & Wolverine shows there's still an appetite for the cinematic adventures of comic-book heroes, it's not always a certainty that viewers want to follow these characters onto TV.

Marvel, which was once carpet-bombing Disney+ with its live-action MCU spinoffs (and which doesn't provide viewing figures for its programming), has recently said that it will scale back its TV shows to about two a year. Aside from occasional breakthroughs like Marvel's WandaVision or The Boys on Amazon Prime Video, few superhero shows have left much of a cultural imprint, including other Batman-inspired series like Gotham and Pennyworth.

Reeves said that The Penguin has ambition to be more than a mere brand extension.

"We're not trying to dominate comic-book culture by exploding a universe," he said. "We're trying, in a really focused way, to take these characters seriously, take the audience seriously and do something that we're really excited about."

Telling the story of Cobb's ascent and populating the world of The Penguin was the responsibility of Lauren LeFranc (Impulse, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), who developed the series and served as the showrunner.

After LeFranc was shown about 40 minutes of The Batman while it was still being edited, she began to imagine where she could take the character of Cobb, whom she said she found fascinating but also "a bit problematic and unsavory."

"We're all familiar with people in the world right now who are charming and talk a big game but also have other ideas that really hurt people," LeFranc said. "Oz is a villain more than a hero. He's definitely not a hero."

She began pitching storylines like the one seen in the show's first episode, in which Cobb takes in a timid delinquent named Victor (Rhenzy Feliz) as his assistant and driver. LeFranc also filled out its roster with characters like Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), the vengeful and unpredictable daughter of the ousted mob boss Carmine Falcone, who is alternately a reluctant ally and heated rival to Cobb as he pursues his aspirations.

As a longtime reader of comics and a viewer of their media adaptations, LeFranc said, "I just wanted to write characters that I wished I had seen more of."

The Penguin continues a decades-long trend toward bleak tones in both superhero storytelling and Batman media. Its creative team said that this is an inevitable consequence of trying to reflect the real world in their comic-book adaptation. As LeFranc put it, "My taste is that I think life is funny sometimes in its darkest moments, and I love mixing those tones."

She added, "The world that Matt created in the film is haunting and beautiful, emotional and heightened to a certain extent. But there are aspects of his Gotham City that are very real, and we are playing in the same sandbox."

The Penguin collaborators said those darker elements -- a somber mood, uncensored language and brutal violence -- are also to be expected of a prestige crime drama on premium cable TV, whatever its source material may be.

And for better or worse, those components will distinguish their series from a recent abundance of shows based on comic books, including the glut of Marvel programming on Disney+ or other Batman adaptations that have been tried on other platforms.

Dylan Clark, who is Reeves' longtime producing partner and an executive producer of The Penguin, explained, "HBO allows us to have layers that feel more R-rated."

In preparing "The Penguin," Clark said, he and his colleagues were not seeking their inspiration from other superhero shows.

"We look at the gangsters," he said. "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.' We're not looking at -- and no criticism toward these shows--Pennyworth or Gotham or anything else that has come before in this space. It's just not our focus."

If The Penguin is a means to an end, it is allowing its central villain more room to breathe and tell his story, so that a second (and potentially third) film in Reeves' movie series can properly center on Batman.

"When you look at a lot of Batman movies," Reeves said, "after they do the origin film, then it's like, oh, yeah, then here's the Joker movie or here's the Two-Face movie. It's almost as if those characters take center stage and then Batman begins to function in their story. What I wanted to do with these Batman movies was to keep Batman's arc and his psychology and his evolution at the center."

But as he and his colleagues finish up The Penguin and continue to develop other potential TV spinoffs of "The Batman," they recognize that these shows will work only if they have compelling narrative reasons to exist and can stand on their own.

"People like the familiarity of returning to characters that mean something to them," Reeves said, "but they need it, at the same time, to be new and fresh and relevant to what their life experience is. The bar is super high for what really works."