Gangster shows are an important Dad Show subgenre. Watching mafiosos do bad stuff lets dads experience the vicarious thrill of outlaw life while confirming that their choice to keep on the straight and narrow was the right one. Things like GoodFellas and The Godfather and The Sopranos are the best expressions of “depiction is not endorsement,” because it’s easy to misunderstand them even though their intentions are very clear. Being Italian seems appealing, with the food and the brotherhood and the doing whatever you want, but it will ultimately destroy you and your family, no exceptions.
There are two mobster dramas that recently debuted new seasons: the Batman spinoff The Penguin, which premiered last week on HBO and Max, and the Sylvester Stallone dramedy Tulsa King, which returned for Season 2 on Paramount+ earlier this month. Though their style and goals are very different, they both present visions for how to make a Sopranos-influenced gangster drama in the contemporary moment.
The Batdad
The Penguin is a TV spinoff of The Batman, the 2022 movie that stars Robert Pattinson as emo Bruce Wayne. The Batman was an awful, boring, ill-conceived film overall, but Colin Farrell’s performance as Oswald Cobblepot, aka the Penguin, was the best part. Farrell is one of my favorite actors and I will watch him in almost anything, and I enjoyed his performance as Oz in the film enough to be cautiously excited about a Batman-less limited series where he battles Cristin Milioti, another performer worth watching in anything, for control of Gotham City’s underworld. And after watching the premiere episode, I can say it’s definitely better than The Batman, but not as good as it would be if it were just a normal crime show.
The Penguin suffers from the same affliction that The Batman, Joker, and every other superhero property that draws heavy influence from more traditional genres suffers from: it can’t be the thing it wants to be. The Penguin wants to just be a gritty ‘70s-style New York City crime drama, but it has to also be a superhero franchise tie-in, which gives it an inherent inauthenticity and corniness that cannot be resolved. Instead of Corsicans smuggling heroin, we get an Irish guy doing a parody of an Italian guy who’s smuggling eyedrop drugs that make users go “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff!” and turn into berserkers or whatever. Which would be fine, if it wasn’t trying to be so serious.
The best The Penguin can do is remind you of the better things it’s influenced by. It’s Scarface, but without any specificity to its time and place. It’s King of New York, but with the grime sanitized off. Imagine how much better The Penguin would be if Oswald Cobblepot was just a weird crook in Brooklyn who didn’t have all this Batman baggage. Why can’t we have a big-budget crime epic without a superhero tie-in? Will people really only watch stuff now if it’s part of a franchise? It’s just so depressing how there’s no infrastructure to take bets on original ideas anymore, and it’s getting worse. If David Chase pitched The Sopranos now, the studio would say “That’s good, but what if this Tony Soprano guy was the Hulk?”
Speaking of Tone, Colin Farrell is doing him in this. It’s very silly. The way he pronounces certain woids, it’s clear he studied James Gandolfini’s diction. Cobblepot even has Gandolfini’s hair. He looks like a grotesque mashup of every Sopranos actor.
Farrell is certainly not bad in the role, but it’s not his best work. He’s experimenting with extremity, trying to make himself as unrecognizable as possible with the makeup, the voice, and the walk. But it’s not real. Colin Farrell is working very hard under there, but the effort is all we see. He doesn’t become the Penguin. The costume is wearing him.
Watching The Penguin, I was reminded of The North Water, an excellent 2021 limited series in which Colin Farrell also underwent a physical transformation to play a fucked up villain. He plays Harry Drax, an evil harpoonist on a whaling ship in 1859, and he’s depraved and terrifying. Instead of putting on a fatsuit, he actually got fat. The North Water is the kind of authentically rendered (they actually filmed some of it in the Arctic) and thematically rich (it’s about the decline of the British Empire, and how all that was left in the absence of colonial power was cruelty) show that The Penguin wishes it could be. Of course, nobody watched it, and it made no economic sense, and that kind of show will be confined to that historical blip when everyone was trying to compete with Netflix, not realizing that Netflix was playing a different game it had already won.
There’s a funny connection between The Penguin and our next show that allows me to do a natural transition. Right before Tulsa King, executive producer Terence Winter developed a Gotham City PD show that would have been a spinoff of The Batman. It didn’t pan out, and The Penguin got made instead. He lucked out…
Tulsa Dad
…Because instead he got to join TV’s greatest franchise, the Taylor Sheridan Universe (though he briefly left Tulsa King after Season 1 amidst creative disagreements before returning for Season 2, because it’s not easy working in the Sheridanverse). Sheridan, the successful and prolific creator of Yellowstone and eight other shows and counting, created Tulsa King, but Winter is the primary writer, and Tulsa King operates somewhat independently from the rest of Sheridan’s empire. Because while Taylor Sheridan is one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood at the moment, Sylvester Stallone has been a don for 50 years. Taylor Sheridan was in preschool when Rocky came out. I wonder, though, if it really came down to it, who would win in a battle of egos between Sheridan and Stallone. Sheridan defeated Kevin Costner, but would he triumph over Sly if it came down to it? I wonder.
Stallone stars as Dwight Manfredi, a New York mobster who gets banished to Tulsa but ends up running the criminal underworld there. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy that’s basically “what if a guy from The Sopranos went country?” (This has been done before in Lilyhammer, which was “Silvio Dante in Norway”). The Sopranos influence is strong. Winter was a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos, and the cast includes former Sopranos actors Max Casella, Vincent Piazza, and Annabella Sciorra, who played Gloria Trillo, Tony’s most important cumare. Tulsa King has a different tone, though; The Sopranos was funny, but Tulsa King is a comedy. In Tulsa King, Dwight’s crew steals a bunch of catalytic converters off cars parked in a dealership lot, and when the owner, who acts like a cartoon cowboy, realizes what happens, he exclaims “bite my ass to hell,” an expression I believe was made up for this scene. The Sopranos came in at the very end of the Italian mafia era, and Tulsa King recognizes that the idea of an old school mobster in a contemporary setting is absurd.
Tulsa King does one of my favorite Dad Show things, which is present its criminal main character in such a way where you’re not sure if the show thinks he’s an antihero or an actual hero. Sheridan shows in general do this a lot — when I write about Yellowstone in a couple of months, I’ll get more into it with Rip and Beth, the two most despicable romantic leads in all of television — but Reacher and Ray Donovan do this, too. It’s very common in Dad Shows that have prestige drama budgets but aren’t as smart and sophisticated as the shows they’re influenced by. Tulsa King is pretty egregious with it — you’re supposed to root for Dwight to repair his relationship with his family and triumph over other criminals who are less ethical and swaggy than him — but the fact that it’s a comedy makes it less cognitively dissonant.
Tulsa King isn’t great art or anything, but it’s dumb fun and I enjoy watching it. Chapo Trap House did a hilarious episode about it once that’s worth listening to if you want to further understand Tulsa King’s bonehead appeal. That episode is a big influence on Dad Shows in general, to be honest. I also think Terence Winter is a cool guy, which gets the show some good will with me. I interviewed him a few weeks ago and really enjoyed talking to him. Please check it out on TV Guide if you haven’t already. Here’s fun excerpt:
-I reviewed Season 2 of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon for TV Guide. At this point, The Walking Dead is only for diehards, and I guess they just want the same thing over and over again? I don’t know.
-I reviewed the new Fox action drama Rescue HI-Surf for TheWrap, an unambitious procedural that I nevertheless enjoyed, mostly because it looks really beautiful. I have a feeling it won’t get a second season, but this one is fun.
The North Water was so good it had to die. Peak Prestige TV that we’ll never see again.
I totally agree with you on The Penguin. I also disliked The Batman and thought the only good thing that came out of it was that we got a spin-off show with Farrell. At the same time, I kind of appreciate that we have a gangster drama in a superhero universe that has the feel and look of a straightforward crime epic and doesn't try to tie every single plot point into a franchise. It's not the real thing, as you said, but it's an approach I can actually enjoy for what it is as opposed to 99 percent of DC and Marvel shows/movies today. Plus, we had the real deal with Gomorra, Peaky Blinders, etc., so I'm fine with a superficially manufactured mobster drama every once in a while.
Also: The North Water was insanely good. One of Farrell's most heinous and terrifying performances.
I haven't started S2 of Tulsa King yet, but it's certainly the dumb fun I enjoyed the hell out of while watching its debut season. Sheridan vs. Stallone today? My bet would be on Sheridan.