The Penguin executive producer Matt Reeves said the hit series could get a second season following the incredible popularity of the first.
Developed by Lauren LeFranc, the spinoff to Reeves’ 2022 film The Batman sees an unrecognisable Colin Farrell reprise his role as Oz Cobb in a fresh take on the comic book character originally played by Danny Devito in Tim Burton’s 1992 sequel Batman Returns.
The TV series is set two weeks after the end of The Batman, in which Cobb plays the Falcone and Maroni crime families off against each other in a power grab following the death of mob leader Carmine Falcone, played by Mark Strong.
It is unclear if The Penguin was originally planned as a limited series but Reeves now says that a potential second season is in discussion.
“We’re in discussions. Lauren is thinking hard and we’re talking, so we’ll see,” he told Variety on the Emmys red carpet. “We love the show, and we think our cast is so incredible. The work that Lauren and the writers did was incredible. Our passion was in it, but never in our wildest dreams could we imagine it would have been received in the way that it was.”
On Sunday, Cristin Milioti, who plays Carmine’s daughter Sofia Falcone, won the Emmy for lead actress in a limited series, calling the role a “bright spot”.
“I am so profoundly grateful. I loved making this show and I loved playing Sofia so much,” she said. “It is very hard to make sense of being alive right now in this world and so I’m deeply grateful for the bright spots. And making this show with our incredible cast and our incredible crew and getting to inhabit this woman was a bright spot for me despite it being, like, very grisly. Playing her felt like flying.”
Farrell’s performance in the eight-episode series has been hailed as one of the best on-screen portrayals of a comic book villain.
Nick Hilton gave it three stars in his review for The Independent. “The vision that showrunner Lauren LeFranc has extracted from Matt Reeves’ The Batman is more grown-up than Bruno Heller’s Gotham, which covered similar territory on Channel 5,” the critic noted.
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“You just need to look at the emo character design of Robin Lord Taylor’s Penguin to appreciate that. The Penguin offers a different vision – different, too, to Danny DeVito’s seminal performance – and one that will appeal to comic book aficionados who prefer the grime of Gotham to the multicoloured Marvel miasma.”
