Is The Penguin really the perfect marriage between Batman and The Sopranos?

Warning: This following article contains minor spoilers about The Penguin.

Here’s an interesting challenge to start with: watch a gangster on TV, with an East Coast American accent, and not Never think of Tony Soprano. It’s practically impossible. Colin Farrell knows something about it. He’s the one who plays the role of the anti-hero in The Penguinthe new spin-off series of The Batman Matt Reeves’s upcoming film starring Robert Pattinson, which focuses on Oz Cobb, aka The Penguin, the eternal slayer of the bat man. Farrell told a reporter fromAFP when the series premiered that he had drawn inspiration from “everything that[il] read or seen about this world [des gangsters de la côte est]” to prepare for the role, but that he had not gone so far as to watch it again The Sopranos.

It’s understandable why. Oz shares a lot with Tony Soprano, played by the late James Gandolfini: an accent, a gangster lifestyle, a hard work ethic he can’t seem to shake, a difficult relationship with his mother, and a nostalgia for his city’s “golden age” of good old-fashioned crime. The parallels haven’t gone unnoticed. Digital Spy very quickly qualified The Penguin of “spiritual continuation of the Soprano that we didn’t know we needed,” just like the Evening Standard, The Independent et The Hollywood Reporter. It is therefore appropriate to ask to what extent The Penguin looks like Soprano.

As for the setting, we can say that it is quite similar. It is set in the universe of Batmanbut aside from the types of drugs people take and a somewhat cartoonish sequence in Arkham Asylum, The Penguin seems to take place in modern-day New York, or even New Jersey. There is a mafia realism worthy of Sopranowith its Italian surnames and swear words, its slicked-back hair, its labyrinthine family networks and its meetings in nightclubs and other equally shady locations.

Oz and Tony Soprano also share a sensitive side. In THE Sopranoit manifests itself during Tony’s therapy sessions. In The Penguinit is during Oz’s visits to his mother whom he adores. Oz and Tony both have complicated relationships with tough mothers whom they nevertheless love, care for, nurse and sometimes even dance with. But in The PenguinOz’s visits to his house are a little more worried, a little more tender. And while Tony sometimes dances with his mother in the kitchen, Oz remembers very touchingly how he pulled her out of a deep depression after her brothers died, by taking her out to a club one night.