Premiering just a month ago, HBO’s The Penguin has earned consistently high ratings from its viewers, even scoring an impressive 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. DC’s newest television installment doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon, either, with the release of episode 4 last weekend only solidifying The Penguin‘s legacy by receiving a near-perfect score on IMDb.
Cent’Anni, the fourth episode of the gritty, mobster-centric miniseries, follows Cristin Milioti (Palm Springs) as Sofia Falcone, the supposedly psychopathic serial killer going head-to-head with Oz Cobb (played by Colin Farrell) for control of Gotham’s criminal underworld. Milioti’s performance in past episodes has already earned her significant acclaim from fans, so it’s no wonder that the episode focused on her backstory achieved the highest ratings The Penguin has seen so far. Approximately 10,000 viewers on IMDb gave the episode a whopping 9.5/10, beating the previous one, Bliss, which earned only a 9.1/10. Overall, the show sits at an 8.8/10 after 35,000 ratings, due to the slightly weaker reviews from the first few episodes.
The positive response to Cent’Anni demonstrates just how much The Penguin has improved since debuting on September 19th. Critics almost universally praised Milioti’s performance, with one ScreenRant review stating:
“Cristin Milioti is an absolute force of nature: willing to allow herself to be mistreated in the harrowing Arkham induction, forced into a cowering reduction of herself, and then blossoming out of it like a furious wounded animal. The third act, in which she becomes what Carmine wanted her to be, is as close to a horror movie villain as we’ve seen in this show.”
Other fans also praised The Penguin‘s harrowing depiction of Arkham Asylum, a familiar location to DC fans that has already been adapted several times over. “Since its inception, Arkham Asylum has been written to be atrocious and considered hell on earth,” an IMDb review reads, “but no other depiction has shown the audience through the terrifying perspective of an inmate imprisoned in Arkham.“
Another Grounded Gotham Story Manages to Stand Out
Since Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, Batman and Batman-adjacent stories have become increasingly more realistic, with fewer and fewer of those fantastical superhero elements that one might expect to see in the comics. Although not all fans are excited about this shift, wanting to see more loyalty towards the source material, The Penguin has still managed to distinguish itself despite its gritty and grounded setting. The series has close ties to Matt Reeves’ The Batman — which also earned fairly strong ratings — but shows a different perspective than the upper echelons of the city that Bruce Wayne is typically accustomed to. This blunt dissection of the worst parts of Gotham is something that viewers haven’t previously experienced, allowing the show to stand out even more.
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Due to its overwhelmingly positive reception, the future of The Penguin is looking relatively bright. Fans are already clamoring for a second season, which hasn’t been officially greenlit yet — but even producers of the series are discussing their desire to tell more of Oz Cobb’s story. It seems highly unlikely that HBO would cancel such a successful show, but everything depends on The Penguin‘s ability to continue earning high ratings and positive reviews during the remainder of its 10-episode run.
Created by Lauren LeFranc, The Penguin is a crime-drama spin-off television series of 2022’s film The Batman. Set shortly after the events of The Batman, Oz Cobb, A.K.A. the Penguin, begins his rise in the underworld of Gotham City as he contends with the daughter of his late boss, Carmine Falcone, for control of the crime family’s empire.
