The Penguin, Episode 1
NZ release: 20 September 2024
Offensive language, violence, sexual themes Rated on: 20 September 2024
What’s it about?
After the events of The Batman (2022), the series dives into Oswald "Oz" Cobb's rise to power as The Penguin within Gotham City's criminal underworld.
The facts
- Directed by Craig Zobel
- Stars Collin Farell, Cristin Milioti, Clancy Brown, Mark Strong
- English language
- Runtime: 63 minutes
- HBO original
- Based on characters from DC comics
Why did it get this rating?
This series was self-rated by Neon. You can find out more about self-rating by streaming providers here.
Violence
The first episode contains several scenes with graphic violence, the most intense parts include:
- A character is shot in the head twice, with bloodspray shown
- A dead body is dragged around in a bag, thrown down stairs and then tossed into the trunk of a car. You later see the decaying body and a close up shot shows a missing finger on their hand.
- A character is stabbed in the eye with a car freshener. This part is intense as you see a sharp part of the freshener go into his eye with blood spray afterwards, and the sound effects are gruesome. When the character stumbles away, he’s then hit by a bus and killed.
- In an act of torture, a wire is driven under the skin of a character’s arm. The wire is pulled up, cutting into the skin, and blood seeps out while the character screams. They threatened to cut off his arm but this doesn’t happen.
- A character is shot in the head after being interrogated. We don’t see headshot injuries but we see signs of torture on the victim’s body.
Offensive language
Offensive language is used throughout including the words f*ck, sh*t and b*tch, as well as coarse language like damn and pussy.
Sexual themes
You see a brief shot of a breast, and a nude male from far away.
Characters visit a brothel, however this is not with the intention of having sex and no sex acts are shown.
This page focuses on content from Episode 1 of The Penguin, but we’re also flagging that Episode 4 includes significant suicide themes, so we’ve provided the following breakdown below for context.
Suicide themes
Episode 4, Cent’anni, dives into a character’s backstory. It contains several references to suicide, particularly in flashbacks that reveal the character as a child discovering their mother’s death, staged to appear as a suicide by hanging - in one scene, you see the mother’s feet swaying and the child go up to the body, touching her hand to try and wake her before realising she’s dead. Over time, it’s revealed that the mother was actually murdered, but the shock of this scene and its lingering effects on the character's life makes it unsettling.
The same killer goes on to target other women, with each murder staged to look like suicide. Initially, these deaths are presented as a tragic series of suicides, sparking discussions around mental illness. Although it turns out to be a calculated killer rather than a pattern of suicides, discussion around these themes could be upsetting for some viewers.
