HBO's The Penguin is being compared to The Sopranos. Does it deserve the hype?

The Penguin is yet another Batman spin-off series — but it looks more like a sequel to The Sopranos than anything in the Bat-verse.

Premiering tomorrow in Canada on Crave, it's one of 2024's most anticipated shows due in no small part to lead actor Colin Farrell, who is unrecognizable as the Gotham City gangster.

Today on Commotion, culture critics Roxana Hadadi and Rad Simonpillai join guest host Ali Hassan to unpack whether the new series lives up to the hype — and the comparisons to other memorable gangster shows like The Sopranos.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Ali: Roxana, Batman doesn't show up at all in this series. That might surprise some, but to anybody who's gotten into the Joker world, that's not so strange at all. So how does that approach work for you, telling this story as a gangster drama?

Roxana: It worked really well for me, if only because I am a Godfather person, I'm a Martin Scorsese person. I think it's really fun to remove Batman from a story and to make it more grounded, a little bit more realistic, a little bit more like gangster pastiche. I mean, the reality of Batman is any story with Batman is going to be overwhelmed by him. He's such an outsized figure that I think it opens up the world of storytelling possibility, actually, to remove him, right? He is not the foe who is sort of dictating everything Penguin does.

This version of the story is a lot more like … infighting within the gangs of Gotham. Who's going to end up on top? I really liked that. I thought that it kept the stakes pretty clear and the storytelling very quick-moving. I didn't have the fear that Batman would come and ruin the day. It was nice to not have that fear.

Ali: That's funny, "Batman ruins the day." Some people say "saves" the day, but alright, we'll go in that direction.… Rad, this is the story of how the Penguin becomes the biggest gangster in Gotham City. It's also a story about his very complicated relationship with his mother.

Now, I had a hernia this summer. The instructions were watch TV, do nothing. And what I started doing was rewatching The Sopranos, which is why I've made this comparison. It's the story of Tony Soprano. So how does that storyline draw you in here?

Rad: This is a show that is very much mimicking Sopranos on the surface…. Sopranos obviously did it better, but I think it is very interesting the way The Penguin deals with it because, yeah, this is the story about him trying to live up to the expectations of this really overbearing mother. That's part of this portrait that we get of the Penguin, where he's a guy with severe self-esteem issues, right? The self-esteem issues have to deal with the overbearing mother, but also the way he's cast aside from society because he has this bum leg and he's got all this scar tissue — the way he looks, basically.

And so you see that manifest in his rage, in the way he wants to control things and the way he wants to make himself bigger than he really is. You see the vulnerability in his performance and the way he tries to express all that. And it gets really interesting because if this character's ever interesting, it's fun to see his kind of self-satisfaction in his own performance — in the way he's performing being bigger than he is. And when he's like, "Man, I pulled that off," you still see that angry little kid inside trying to prove himself.

Ali: Roxana, the show will end up in HBO's, what they call, a prestige Sunday night slot…. Does that amp up expectations for the show, and do you think it delivers?

Roxana: It definitely amps up expectations. But I also think it's been sort of an up-and-down year for HBO, right? Like, House of the Dragon second season I found more entertaining than the first, but I think it didn't necessarily hit as hard. The Regime and The Sympathizer earlier this year similarly felt like there was a muted reception. So I think The Penguin is very hyped. You have Colin Farrell, this movie star who is starring in it. You're returning to this very well-received world of Matt Reeves' first film [The Batman]. So I do think expectations are pretty high.

I think comparing it with The Sopranos does it a disservice, because it is still an IP project, right? It is still constrained by the limitations of a prequel. But at the same time, this is going to be HBO's brave new world, right? They're doing more IP. They're doing a Harry Potter show. The City of God sequel series is also airing right now. So they're really trying to grasp on to this space. And I do think The Penguin is better than I expected, and will be entertaining for some people. But it also is a question mark for what the future of HBO will be.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.