MobLand: TV Review - Top Notch Cast Saves Middling Mob Drama

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This isn’t a great show…and it might not even be a good show…but it is somehow, someway, a somewhat mindlessly entertaining show.

MobLand, which stars Tom Hardy as a mob-fixer in modern-day London, just finished its first season on Paramount +…and I have some thoughts.

As readers may remember, I have been in a bit of a funk when it comes to film and television as of late…television in particular. I have been overcome with a great sense of indifference to the current era of “prestige tv”, and have struggled to even watch a show for more than two episodes.

For example, the recent spate of new seasons of prestige tv dramas – Severance, The Last of Us and The White Lotus, I did not watch or quit watching after two episodes because I just didn’t give a shit.

Readers may also remember that I almost skipped the Disney + series Andor altogether, but ended up watching it out of some weird sense of duty and ended up really loving it.

Which brings us to MobLand.

I am not a regular Paramount + viewer. In fact, I’m usually not subscribed to the streaming service but because my wife wanted to watch one of the shows she enjoys (Yellowjackets) we got it for like a three-month deal or something. It was during this stretch that I saw ads for MobLand…and I saw it starred Tom Hardy, an actor I really admire, and when I was bored one day, I figured, why not give MobLand a try?

MobLand, which premiered its first episode March 30th and ended its ten-episode season June 1st, has quite the pedigree…it is produced by British filmmaker Guy Ritchie, it is co-written and created by esteemed playwright and screenwriter Jez Butterworth, and its cast features the aforementioned Tom Hardy as well as Paddy Considine, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren….not too shabby.

The series follows the travails of Harry De Souza (Hardy), a fixer for the Harrigan crime family. The Harrigans – led by aging patriarch Conrad (Pierce Brosnan) and Lady MacBeth like matriarch Maeve (Helen Mirren), are quite the collection of misfits and miscreants. Kevin Harrigan (Paddy Considine), son to Conrad and Maeve, is Harry De Souza’s childhood friend and his adult accomplice in crime.

Of course, Harry and Kevin have wives and teenage kids and they create all sorts of drama too, and Conrad and Maeve like to stir the pot with their various nefarious machinations as well. There are also the cops who are breathing down the Harrigan’s neck as is another crime family looking for blood and to take their crown.

I’ll avoid plot specifics from here on in…but rest assure there is A LOT of plot, and a whole lotta shit going down in the seedy London crime world.

So, is MobLand as great show? No. Is it a good show? I’ll be honest…I don’t think so. Is it a watchable show? Yes…most definitely.

The reason it’s watchable is because it has a terrific cast that do steady work despite the at-times trying script. The plot is…well…very tv show-ish…meaning it is preposterous and outlandish to the point of being absurd.

MobLand isn’t the Sopranos, or the Godfather or Goodfellas…and yet…I kept watching it, which is saying a great deal. As flawed as it is, its greatest trait is that it is somehow mindless enough to be oddly compelling.  

Tom Hardy does stellar work as the brooding Harry, who navigates the Harrigan spiderweb of treachery with a steely-eyed aplomb. Hardy never lets you down and that is very true in MobLand, as this show just doesn’t work without him.

Pierce Brosnan is showier than we’ve ever seen him as Conrad – the bombastic and brutal crime boss, and it is amusing to watch him huff and puff and blow doors down in every scene he inhabits.

Paddy Considine, a truly remarkable actor, gives maybe the best performance in the show as a conflicted and psychologically tormented son to greatness. Considine imbues his Kevin with a bruised and battered humanity that is desperately trying to survive in a cruel and heartless world, and it is quite riveting to behold.

Unfortunately, I found Helen Mirren’s performance as Maeve to be, frankly, distractingly bad, but at least she isn’t in it enough to really muck things up. There’s just something off about Mirren’s portrayal of Maeve…a sort of disconnect, which is not apparent in any of the other performances.

One performance of note is Anson Boon as Eddie Harrigan, Kevin’s rebellious son (and Conrad and Maeve’s favorite grandchild). Boon is so good at playing Eddie as a despicable douchebag asshole, that he might just ruin his entire career. And the costume designer who put him in the most off-putting douchebag ensembles, deserves an Emmy – well done. Boon is like that kid who played Joffrey in Game of Thrones and was so good at being an obnoxious piece of shit he essentially quit acting afterwards. Boon as Eddie has the most punchable face in recent memory and the attitude to match…and it is shocking how much I hated this little prick. Kudos to him.

As for the structure of the series, it is kind of all over the place. The show starts small and gets much too big for its britches and it becomes more preposterous with every passing moment and by the end of season one is borderline psychotic. But like I said, it is an oddly fun piece of mindless tv…and can be enjoyed in that way.

If you’re bored, or bed-ridden, or have nothing else to do but stare out a window, you could do much worse than watch MobLand to pass the time. It is one of those shows that asks nothing from you and lets you just watch with no pressure and no expectations.

MobLand certainly didn’t end my indifference towards television, but it did do enough to keep me watching it…and that should be considered a victory…for who I have no idea.

©2025

The Penguin: A TV Review - We Have a Frontrunner for the Best Show of the Year

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. The best show of the year and easily the greatest comic book IP series since Daredevil.

The Penguin, which stars Colin Farrell in the titular role, chronicles the rise of one of Gotham’s most infamous villains. It is the first tv series in filmmaker Matt Reeves’, director of The Batman (2022), DC Cinematic Universe.

The series, which premiered on HBO and the streaming service MAX on September 19th with its eight-episode season ending on November 10th, is set in the immediate aftermath of the events of The Batman (2022), but also serves as an origin story for Oswald Cobb - The Penguin.

For a variety of reasons, one of which is that I’ve had to sit through a cavalcade of terribly disappointing Marvel tv shows over the last bunch of years, I had low expectations when I sat down to watch the first episode of The Penguin.

I assumed the series would just be another watered-down piece of IP nonsense with little meaning or purpose beyond momentarily distracting me from the mundanity and minutia of life.  

Then I watched the first episode…and goodness gracious was I proven dead wrong.

The first episode of The Penguin hits like Bat Kick to the chest. It reveals a creative team that is dead serious about the subject matter and an artistic and cinematic sensibility and quality that is exceedingly rare in any television show…never mind a comic book television show. Put simply The Penguin is comic book series as elite prestige tv.

The credit for the show’s success goes first to the series’ creator and showrunner Lauren LeFranc, who expertly brought the cinematic vision of Matt Reeves to life on the small screen.

LeFranc’s fearless approach never allowed for winking at the audience or cutting creative corners. LeFranc set out to make a devastatingly dramatic television series that just so happened to be set in a comic book universe, and she succeeded spectacularly.  

LeFranc is loyal to the cinematic style of Reeves, and her ground-level view of Gotham is gloriously gritty, grimy, grungy and gruesome. As a result, The Penguin seems like a slightly lesser version of HBO prestige dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, as it looks cinematic and feels authentic.

For all eight episodes, LeFranc masterfully toys with audience expectations and conditioning. She subverts audience expectations so expertly at every turn that viewers are kept continually off-balance through the course of the narrative. And the finale is as perfect a piece of villain origin story as you’ll ever see.

The second person responsible for the success of The Penguin is the Penguin himself, Colin Farrell.

Farrell’s performance as Oswald Cobb, aka The Penguin, is as great a performance as we’ve seen in television in years. Under mountains of makeup which render him unrecognizable, Farrell is able to imbue his character with a vivid and frantic inner life that pulsates and radiates incessantly.

Farrell’s Penguin is a vulnerable, yet vile, violent and vicious villain. His relentless quest for power and his insatiable hunger for love are inexorably intertwined, and fuel his grinding ascent from lowlife street thug to high level mobster.

It is an absolute joy to watch Farrell in the last decade or so blossom into such a terrific actor. He has always been a naturally magnetic screen presence, but in recent years his skill has matured and made him into one of the best actors we’ve got. If he doesn’t win an Emmy for his work on The Penguin then there is no justice in this crazy world.

The rest of the cast are almost as fantastic as Farrell.

Cristin Milioti is essentially the co-lead in the series as she stars as Sofia Falcone, the troubled adult daughter of mob boss Carmine Falcone. Milioti is an absolute revelation in the role. She radiates an unnerving energy every time she’s on-screen…one that is both fragile and furiously fierce. Milioti too should garner Emmy recognition as she had a lot of heavy lifting to do in the series and does it with aplomb.

Deirdra O’Connell plays Francis Cobb, the Penguin’s mom. O’Connell is spectacular in the role of the scheming mother. In lesser hands this role had the potential to scuttle the whole show, but O’Connell gives a powerhouse performance that elevates the already superb series.

Rhenzy Feliz plays Victor, a homeless teenager who Oswald/The Penguin takes under his wing. Feliz at first seems like the weak link in the show. His performance feels a little thin and a bit shallow and showy…but as the series went on his work got stronger until in the final few episodes, he really came into his own. Ultimately, Feliz shows himself to be a very worthy actor.

The rest of the cast, which includes a few notable actors, like Mark Strong, Clancy Brown and Michael Kelly, all bring a gravitas and professionalism to the festivities that only adds to the quality of the show.

A bunch of years ago one of my friend’s father, the incomparable “Hollywood” Gary, made the astute observation that the reason why the Dark Knight trilogy was so successful and so good was because if Batman really existed in the world, that’s how it would be. I concur. The same exact thing is what makes The Penguin so good.

It is almost irrelevant that The Penguin is set in a comic book universe because it feels like a story about low level and low life mobsters set in the real world. This could be a spin-off from a Scorsese series like Boardwalk Empire for crissakes.

The battle between the cinematic universes of DC and Marvel haven’t been much of a fight for the last fourteen years or so. Marvel has dominated the cultural landscape and DC has stumbled through the failures that was the Snyderverse.

But since 2019, things have begun to slowly change.

That year Marvel capped its incredible run with the two-billion-dollar box office darling, Avengers: Endgame. But that same year DC came out with Joker…which was a prestige comic book movie that garnered a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor Oscar nominations (and a win for Best Actor and Best Original Score) and made a billion dollars.

Marvel since then has churned out a plethora of movies and tv series, most of which were mediocrities and some of which were considerably less than mediocre.

DC on the other hand, gave us Matt Reeves’ The Batman, and now The Penguin. Both of these pieces of work are vastly superior to anything Marvel has put out since Endgame. And even though Joker and Joker: Folie a Deux are not connected to the Matt Reeves cinematic universe, both of those films (yes, even the near universally panned Folie a Deux – which I actually loved) are undeniably more artistically daring and dynamic than anything Marvel has EVER done.

The best thing about DC at the moment is that cinematically, artistically and thematically, its cinematic universe is much darker than Marvel’s. This has been a complaint by some, but never by me. I like the darker material, and the Marvel material in comparison seems, frankly silly to the point of ridiculousness.

Visually the same is true. DC is making real movies with a distinct and artistically compelling cinematic aesthetic, while Marvel churns out the flattest and most visually bland movies and tv shows imaginable that look, frankly, unconscionably cheap.

The battle for comic book IP supremacy may be irrelevant at this point as the superhero genre seems to be in a recession which may head into a depression. But if we are measuring it in artistic terms, DC is winning right now and it isn’t even close, and that winning may lead to more cultural cache.

One can only hope DC keeps going in this direction…although I must say that James Gunn being in charge at DC and making a Superman movie does not fill me with much confidence that the ship will stay headed in the right direction.

Regardless of all that, The Penguin is undeniably the best TV series I’ve seen this entire year, and tied with Netflix’s Daredevil (2015-2018) as the best comic book series ever made.

If you have a passing interest in comic book IP or in mob movies and tv shows, you have to watch The Penguin because it isn’t just what a great comic book tv series should be, it is what a great tv series should be.

©2024

The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey : The Many Saints of Newark - Video Review

Hello readers! Just wanted to share with you all the premiere episode of my new film review series for RT, The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey.

First up…The Sopranos prequel - The Many Saints of Newark. Hope you enjoy and thanks for watching!

©2021