It’s impressive how little The Penguin cares about being a Batman show. You might even wonder why it matters at all. This is a show that clearly favors the mafia canon over that of the comic books, a thinly veiled excuse to Scar face in Gotham City, or to imagine a version of The Godfather Part II that’s about Fredo. This may irritate some people, and please others—it’s certainly different of the Marvel Cinematic Universe-style Easter egg hunts that audiences have been bombarded with in recent years. But it’s also an odd duck, an HBO series that struggles to square with the network’s lust for prestige—and, of course, its other (extremely famous) gangster epics.

The new series follows Colin Farrell’s heavily prosthetic reimagining of Oz “The Penguin” Cobb, in the aftermath of the 2022 outbreak. The Batman. An opening montage reminds viewers of the state of affairs in Matt Reeves’ version of Gotham City, and the short version is: Batman’s kind of screwed up. The Riddler has bombed the city, flooding the streets and turning the poorer neighborhoods into disaster areas. The city’s resources are scarce. And mob boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro in the film) is dead, leaving a power vacuum in the underworld.

Batman and Bruce Wayne play no part in this story. The many criminals of The Penguin seem to have no thought for the armored man whose favorite pastime is beating up petty thugs. This omission remains odd—I understand that this version of the superhero is just getting started, but The Batman made it pretty clear that people in Gotham at least heard from him. Furthermore, The Penguin leans on some of the comic book’s own ways to make it clear that Gotham isn’t just a fictional New York, such as the existence of a drug economy built around “drops,” a strange side trip to Arkham Asylum, and Riddler question marks plastered all over billboards. There are a hilarious number of scenes where characters walk past this very obvious comic book iconography and act like they’re not in a comic book show.

There is a precedent for the genre trappings here. Many of the most popular and influential Batman comics are very much crime stories, such as Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year Oneor Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween and the sequel, Dark Victory—all of which provide information The Penguin. Knowing this, it’s not hard to imagine a gangster saga that simply leaves out the Caped Crusader, detailing what corruption the hero is determined to root out, or how disruptive his arrival might be to an established underworld.

The Penguin tends towards the latter. In keeping with his characterization in The BatmanOz Cobb is a shit-talker and schemer who sees an opportunity to work his way up from glorified drug dealer to true kingpin. He commands little respect—his name of crime is meant to be an insult said to his face—and he doesn’t seem to be very good at much of what he sets out to do. But he is driven, moved by an undying rage at the world around him for overlooking him and denying him the power and opportunity he believes is his, and he has a knack for convincing other disaffected men to join him in a fight to take back what’s theirs. Batman may not be there, but he’s offered Oz a chance, and he’s going to take it.

This is perhaps the most compelling thing about The Penguin: Through the characterization of Oz and his place in Gotham, it illustrates the seductive appeal of gangster stories, and suggests that it might not be so different from what draws people to superhero fables. The toxic fandom inherent in both only serves to underscore this. For that reason, the best character on the show, and the reason it all comes together so well, is a woman.

Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) is a direct threat to Oz’s ambitions. Recently released from Arkham, she is a surprise heir to the Mafia throne, an aspiring queen to match Oz’s criminal goals. Like Diane Keaton in The godfather or any woman who walks into an old patriarchal stronghold, she is immediately shut out by men who have or want power, but she continually finds ways to get her foot in the door, to thwart plans, to build her own empire. In the eight-episode series The Penguin takes the time to examine both Oz and Sofia, to find the cracks in their psyches that give them the desire to reshape the city in their own image, and to discover more in their small-minded humanity than in their criminal instincts.

Here is where The Penguin it feels most like The Sopranosand turns his attention to the damaged families that produce men like Oz or women like Sofia, and how the crime “families” they are part of reflect their gaping emotional needs. The comparison is uncomfortable and impossible to avoid: a sharp divide between the prestigious tv from the time when the term was first coined to what it looks like today. What used to describe a subset of shows that challenged broadcast norms and pushed boundaries has now become a formal standard, a mold ready to receive the IP tie-in that every major media property must now have, even HBO.

Yet there is a craft involved The Penguin that makes it satisfying in its own right, a dazzling work of IP brinkmanship with the cunning goal of seeing how far you can take the Batman name for a spin while starving Batman fans of his presence. Like it or not, this is just how prestige TV is made these days, but at least it can still be done Good.