‘The Penguin’ Waddles Onto HBO

When Matt Reeves was preparing his 2022 film “The Batman,” his sprawling, blockbuster exploration of crime-ridden Gotham City and its hometown vigilante, he would sometimes remark — half-jokingly and half-not — that it really needed to be an HBO series.

Reeves, who directed and co-wrote the nearly three-hour movie, felt there were still stories to tell and characters to explore, like Oz Cobb, a midlevel mobster played with foul-mouthed gusto (and pounds of prosthetic makeup) by Colin Farrell.

Though the character appeared in only a few scenes, Reeves said, “There was something electric about Colin. He just completely embodied a spirit that was so fresh and so powerful. You wanted to look at him under a microscope and understand, who is that guy?”

That desire is fulfilled in “The Penguin,” an HBO series premiering on Sept. 19. Picking up immediately after the events of “The Batman,” its eight episodes return to Reeves’s grungy incarnation of Gotham while chronicling Cobb’s rise to his perch atop the city’s empire of organized crime.

“The Penguin” is an unapologetic bridge to a planned “Batman” sequel, but it is also trying to use TV to provide something that movies cannot: a longform character study of its crude and wily title character, who is very different from the dapper, top-hat and monocle-wearing bad guy seen in decades’ worth of Batman comics.

“The Penguin” is arriving amid a boom-and-bust cycle of cinematic superhero universes. “The Batman” was a $772 million-dollar hit for Warner Bros. at the worldwide box office. And while the summertime success of Disney’s “Deadpool & Wolverine” shows there’s still an appetite for the cinematic adventures of comic-book heroes, it’s not always a certainty that viewers want to follow these characters onto TV.