You may have heard: The penguinHBO’s TV spin-off of The Batmanisn’t good or even great, but better yet, the greatest achievement of prestige TV since – I don’t know –The last of us. The hype may be hard to believe for several reasons. First, the once-great superhero craze of the past decade has reached a point of bloat and annoyance, with more misses than hits from both Warner Bros. like Disney. Five years ago, with Todd Phillips joker was a billion-dollar hit, the rare W for DC-affiliated films after Christopher Nolan, but earlier this month Warner Bros. Phillips’ long-awaited sequel, joker: Folie à Deuxonly to have it somehow flop as hard as Morbius And Mrs. Web. Matt Reeves’s The Batman, Although it didn’t gross more than a billion dollars, it managed to be a respectable coup for Warner Bros. We’ll eventually get a sequel to that too, but for now we’ve been treated to an eight-episode miniseries about Oz Cobb, a three-time mafia fixer who fights his way to the top of Gotham’s criminal underworld. Robert Pattinson wouldn’t appear in this series, and Batman wouldn’t even deserve a stray mention. Colin Farrell should wear this thing. All things considered, it was a shaky proposition.

But ultimately I have to agree with the raves: this show is indeed quite good – dare I say it: better than it has any right to be. This is, for the record, a series in which Farrell reluctantly dons uncomfortable prosthetics and staggers from one treacherous conversation to the next, bluntly deploying his thickest New York Italian accent in this relatively grounded drama about comic book gangsters who use fictional narcotics distribute resources in Not Manhattan. The penguin is a spin-off from The Batman, Yes, but it unfolds comprehensibly enough for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie or else has forgotten what happened in it and is at least vaguely aware that Penguin is the tuxedoed man with the umbrella, once played by Danny DeVito in a very different story. time. For hours you’re lulled into thinking you’re watching a perfectly normal crime drama, only to be periodically reminded that these guys are churning out that futuristic ophthalmological crack. Cowboy Bebop. But it works: Farrell and Cristin Milioti deliver simply irresistible performances here.

The special strengths of The penguin are most powerfully summarized in Sunday’s episode, “Cent’Anni,” which—after showing the entire season in advance—is the strongest of the eight. This is an hour-long backstory for disillusioned mob daughter Sofia Falcone, previously portrayed as a ruthless girl boss by Crystal Reed in Fox’s Gotham and now noticeably played with a much more frenetic, horrorcore behavior from Milioti in The penguin. Oz Cobb may be a bad guy, but he’s our guy; Sofia is an ominous figure who alternately distrusts and embraces him. She’s also the only woman of substance in an otherwise paternal organization, so she, like the outsider Oz, fights an uphill battle for influence. Oz and Sofia go way back; Oz was her driver and, in a way, her advisor when she was younger. But the backstory of the bad blood between Oz and Sofia is only part of “Cent’Anni.”

This episode is Sofia’s origin story. It starts with a tender look at her privileged childhood. Young Sofia is sweet, but she also wants to succeed her father as head of the Falcones (in place of her rudderless younger brother Alberto), but she is still quite naive about the cruelty the role requires. With some trepidation, she explores the painful topics of her mother’s suicide many years earlier and her father’s recent dealings with prostitutes in his nightclub. Oz and Alberto both warn her – condescendingly, but sensibly – to back off. She stumbles upon a terrible truth: Carmine Falcone is not strictly a mafia boss, but also a serial killer who indeed murdered the mother of his children. Once warned by Oz about his daughter’s snooping, Carmine shockingly accuses Sofia of the murders, so she ends up in Arkham Asylum. The tabloids, sensationalizing the murder method, now call her the Executioner. She is deemed unfit to stand trial and is therefore forced to languish under the hostile supervision of psychiatric doctors on her father’s payroll, who is perversely determined to ensure that his daughter is thoroughly and irreparably traumatized by the entire experience. This gauntlet of gaslighting and outright torture slowly but surely shapes Sofia into the wild-eyed bone breaker we know and love.

This transformation strikes the crucial balance present in many of the more effective superhero dramas, between being proudly the whimsical stuff of comic books and being something more real and universal. In Arkham, Sofia meets Magpie, who, if you didn’t already know, you’d probably guess is another lesser villain from the comics. She’s the kind of inky and twisted figure that stylishly represents so many clichés of Batman, Gotham, and Arkham. She clings to Sofia and mocks her survival tips, essentially daring her to succumb to the injustice of her situation and become something like her and the other women in the department: nervous, blood-stained maniacs, all of them. Ultimately, she is broken, but she never fully becomes Magpie. Sofia is more muddled and interesting: nervous, yes, as she develops the unpleasantly distinctive habit of lip-smacking, but otherwise grounded, highly functional and largely sympathetic. After all, there are no saints in Gotham, not even Batman.

Batman is the ultimate street-level superhero, a vigilante detective and back-alley brawler who, despite being a wealthy scion, gets his hands dirty – in stark contrast to the loftier missions of Superman or Wonder Woman. Gotham is the ultimate urban underworld. Of The BatmanMatt Reeves has regrounded a character who otherwise, in the hands of Zack Snyder and Ben Affleck, might have become a hazy and unhinged meathead more invested in the supernatural side of things. For much of its runtime, The Batman seems less determined to further a plot than to create an atmosphere: the seedy atmosphere and hedonism of Oz’s Iceberg Lounge. But of course The Batmanas a $200 million superhero blockbuster, was supposed to culminate in the Riddler flooding Not Manhattan and launching an attack on Not Madison Square Garden in a cartoonishly overdeveloped plot to assassinate the mayor. Batman will not appear The penguinhowever, and Penguin, as played by Farrell in The Batmanwas a relatively normal character and not really a full-fledged villain. Here’s his chance to spread his stubby wings.

The penguin is something admirably similar to Marvel’s lineup of shows on Netflix –Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron fist-produced before Disney launched its own streaming service and retroactively made those shows and every other part of the MCU exclusive. Daredevil was a mid-tier superhero who got a rather poorly received theatrical adaptation in the Age of Evanescence, and the rest of these characters were nobody. Their relative obscurity worked to their advantage, however, as these shows were more or less free to develop their own styles, strengths, and stakes with minimal regard for the larger MCU’s tedious 20-year roadmap. These series were more substantial than the soapy stuff on the CW and Fox, while being a lot less overdetermined and overproduced than the core MCU. Daredevil vs. Kingpin, Jessica Jones vs. Kilgrave: These were compelling conflicts that brought previously underappreciated characters to new prominence.

Penguin isn’t quite in the same position as Jessica Jones, but Sofia is. Her dance with Oz feels new, exciting, and genuinely uncertain, which is no small feat in a franchise as old and overdone as Batman’s. Furthermore, the show’s exclusion of the Caped Crusader is starting to feel like a sensible choice; this series bets big on itself, on its own efforts. The penguin doesn’t beg for a second season or even its own movie, even though we as viewers inevitably will – and the studios will inevitably oblige.