There was no way to predict that comics would become Hollywood’s primary content driver when Adam West was wearing Batman tights. The 1966 Batman movie ($1.48 million budget), which spawned the series, turned a profit, but only the craziest studio executive or fan could have imagined that after a 23-year hiatus, Warner Bros. Bros. would bet $48 million on the return of the caped crusader.
Needless to say, it was a gamble that paid off, and today we live in the world that DC and Marvel created. Martin Scorsese, whose success has had an entirely salutary effect on movies, if not the movie business, is a good example. famous comparison those movies to the parks. And even as they became more technologically ambitious, they became more unpredictable. They have their superficial variations, but as expensive propositions whose failure could hurt the studio’s bottom line, they are generally conceptually conservative, and even the high-end pieces are tailored to what fans want.
Television, as I have written before and will surely write again, has been much more interesting when it comes to superheroes. In its lesser stakes, from romantic comedy to family drama to black soap opera, there is formal innovation with a variety of visual approaches and, perhaps most importantly, room to develop characters and relationships between characters.
There are two new comic book series on display at the Royal Game this week to draw attention. As if to highlight their long-standing corporate rivalry, one is DC’s “The Penguin” (HBO, premiering Sept. 19) and the other is Marvel’s “Agatha All Along” (Disney+, streaming now). Each chapter is part of an ongoing canonical story, the overall arc of which doesn’t interest me much, especially given how many times these worlds have been rewritten, rebooted and reconnected over the decades and how short life is that needs to be kept track of.
Christine Milioti plays Sofia Falcone, a member of the crime family that Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) works for in the film Penguin.
(Macall Polay/HBO)
The Penguin is a spin-off of the 2022 Batman movie and will likely lead into 2026’s Batman Part II; “Agatha” is reportedly the second part of a trilogy that began with 2021’s “WandaVision” and is generally a cog in the machine that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, which always sounds like the part my hospital doesn’t want to end.
They’re conceptually different and tonally quite different, but they share certain characteristics. Each focuses on a villain, which is the trend lately, although in the comics Agatha is created as a hero and is a bad person with a sense of humor that makes her good company. Each plays with genre — like “WandaVision,” “Agatha” draws from various TV shows and tropes, while “Penguin” is a straight-up audience story with comic book variations and twists. Both are superbly constructed; in terms of production, acting and cleverly written scenes, they’re almost insignificant.
In his earlier incarnations on page and screen, the Penguin was a madcap society whose signature symbols were the top hat, the monocle and the fancy umbrella. Here, in his first role, played by Colin Farrell (as in “Batman”) under a thick prosthesis, the Penguin is a badly injured, lower-class, middle-aged man whose deformed leg gives him away as something of a Wadley Penguin; Oswald Cobblepot, his official name for many years, has become Oz Cobb. The Falcone crime family he serves are Italian-American gangsters from New York, and Farrell seems to have studied James Gandolfini, whose general manner is modeled after him, in developing his way of speaking.
The crux of the matter is that the Penguin becomes the town’s criminal boss, which involves a bit more lying, betrayal, murder and intelligence than his enemies give him credit for. With its class consciousness and sentimentality, it draws on Depression-era films like The Wine Face, Little Caesar and Public Enemy: the phrase “filthy rat” is uttered more than once and, as in the latter film, the antihero loves his mother (Deirdre O’Connell), who here has dementia.
Besides his mother, Oz has only two significant relationships. One of them is Victor Aguilar (Renzi Feliz), a boy from the projects whom he reluctantly, then half-kindly, takes under his wing, making him nostalgic for the old neighborhood and philosophize about life (“There’s no world where an honest person can succeed”). Another antagonist is Sofia Falcone (Christine Milioti, impressive as the psychotic Liza Minnelli), who used to be Oz’s host. She recently returned home after a decade in Arkham Asylum and is ready to take on the world’s patriarchy. (Reflecting in the mirror, she has daddy issues.)
They fight for control of a powerful drug called Bliss, and with eight episodes left, the dominant hand is passed between them like a ping-pong volleyball. Yet despite flashback episodes that give each of them a psychological foundation, it’s hard to root for either of them – they’re both bad people! Things will end somehow though, nothing that can be torn down. That’s life in Franchiseville.
While you can approach “The Penguin” (created by Lauren LeFranc) with little to no knowledge of Batman (aside from a news report, the Dark Knight never appears here), it’s a good idea to watch “WandaVision” (which itself requires some background on “The Avengers”) before jumping into “Agatha All the Time.” (Both series were created by Jacques Schaeffer.) A lot of it will be obvious and funny without it, but you’ll have a better time if you do. As before, this series is a comedy with deeply emotional episodes.
“WandaVision,” to keep things as simple as possible, centers on the residents of a New Jersey town called Westview, who have been held hostage in various parodies of classic sitcoms (“The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “The Enchanted Magic,” etc.) by Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), in an attempt to cohabitate with Vision (Paul Bettany), who was rejected by Marvel’s writers. Among those trapped in Westview is Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), a witch — and not a very good one — forced by Wanda in the form of her lovely, friendly neighbor Agnes, half Gladys Kravitz, half Millie Aid, and left to stay.’ Down. Agatha got her own theme song (also called Agatha All Along) that went viral, hit the Billboard charts and won an Emmy for songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez.
Agatha, the motley crew of the coven, from left: Sharon, aka Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp); Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali An); Lilia Calderoo (Patti LuPone) and Jennifer Cale (Sasheer Zamata).
(Chuck Zlotnick/MARVEL)
“Agatha” begins not as a sitcom but as a parody of a popular crime drama (“Agnes of Westview,” based on the Danish series “WandaVision”), in which Agatha finds herself in the role of a police officer … a detective investigating a murder. Entering this hallucination is her rival Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) — who may be a worse witch than Agatha — in the form of a federal agent who brings Agatha back to the relatively real world. We also get the first cryptic allusion to The Wizard of Oz, with Agatha darkly reflecting herself in a mirror as the deputy describes the body as “truly the deadest of all.”
To regain her power, Agatha walks the dangerous path of witches and must curb her caustic antisocial tendencies to reunite the coven she is meant to accompany. This ragtag group, all down on their luck, will eventually consist of Jennifer (Sasheer Zamata), a pharmacist; Alice (Ali An), whose mother was a famous rock magician; Lily (Patti LuPone), a psychiatrist; and Sharon Bubbles (Debra Jo Rupp), dragged in to do the act that in the unrealistic comedy Wanda became Mrs. Hart and is not a witch. One mortal admirer is Agatha (Joe Locke), who is referred to only as a teenager (except when Agatha calls him “Toto”) because he is under a spell that desecrates his name. Rio enters, too.
In the four episodes we’ll be reviewing, their journey takes them into other TV dramas – Nicole Kidman’s high-style soap opera (“Huge Tiny Lies” is the aforementioned title) and something akin to “Daisy Jones and the Six” – each with a puzzle to be solved in order to move on to the next stage. Can they see the witch? Do poppies make them sleepy?
It’s all cleverly done and very funny, but also suspenseful and a little scary, with a winning combination of the unusual and the banal (the witches arguing about who was dark and who was flat while singing the magic song). Agatha may not be a good witch, but she’s not evil and she has her reasons. Han is hilarious, which makes him good, enjoyable company, regardless of his antics or cutting remarks.
Marvel has been making TV shows for over a decade, but ever since WandaVision — with original and even stranger series including Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Loki — the MCU’s over-the-top, comedy-prone characters would never have been a good fit for the big screen. They don’t need to distinguish their fourth stage from their fifth stage, which is the one we’re in now, whatever that means. Thanks to craft, they can stand on their own.
