IIf you want to understand how prestige TV (an imperfect term, but bear with us) has changed over the past 25 years, it helps to start with the series that invented the category as we know it today: The Sopranos. An HBO gangster drama whose antihero, Tony Soprano, is a brutal but troubled mid-level mobster with boundless ambition and crippling mother issues, it delivered all the violent thrills typical of its genre. What elevated the show, which premiered in 1999, were cinematic production values, brilliant performances, a perfectly calibrated tone that balanced out darkness with humor, and creator David Chase’s stark examination of Tony’s psychology, the Sopranos as a family unit, and the state of the American dream on the eve of the 21st century.

Twenty-five years later, another highly anticipated gangster drama is set to debut, premiering on September 19th. The Penguin could also be reasonably described as an HBO gangster drama whose antihero is a brutal but troubled mid-level mafioso with boundless ambition and debilitating mother issues. As The SopranosIt features compelling production design and remarkable acting. Criminal psychology, family dynamics, and the American dream are among the major themes; the shows share a pessimism about these subjects that felt revelatory at the turn of the century. But the similarities end there. Even when you consider the fact that The Sopranos was an inimitable masterpiece, The Penguin is a disappointing reflection of the decline across the industry of what we, confusing quality with branding, call prestige TV.

A big difference between the two series is of course that The Penguin expands an exceptionally bankable franchise—Batman—within HBO parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s superhero empire, the DC Universe. In showrunner Lauren LeFranc’s (Agents of SHIELD) paler-than-usual Gotham, the unhinged Riddler has just blown up the city’s seawall on the night of a mayoral election. The residents of one impoverished neighborhood, Crown Point, have been hit hardest, with casualties mounting and entire apartment buildings destroyed. And in the midst of the chaos, someone has murdered powerful crime boss Carmine Falcone.

Played by executive producer and certified movie star Colin Farrell, who first made himself unrecognizable for the role with a fat suit, facial prosthetics and a cartoonish working-class accent in The Batman—Oz “The Penguin” Cobb is determined to profit from this flux. In a tense meeting, Carmine’s drug-addicted son and successor, Alberto (Michael Zegen), condescends to Oz, calling him a “good soldier” and declaring, “You are who you are, and you couldn’t change if you tried.” He doesn’t know how right he is.

The conversation takes a turn when Alberto ridicules a moment of apparent vulnerability in which Oz lays out his views on gangster ethics, praising the “real old-school guy” who ran the poor neighborhood where he grew up: “He helped people. If someone in your family was sick, he’d find you a doctor. If you got low rent, he’d lend you the money. He knew everybody’s name, too. I don’t know how he kept them all in his head, but if he saw you on the street, he’d call out to you. Ask how you were. It felt like he meant it, too.” When the man died, his neighbors held a memorial parade. The monologue is pure Tony Soprano, looking back wistfully on an idealized past when a violent criminal could still be a pillar of the community.

Yes, like Tony, Oz hypocritically claims that despite all the blood he sheds trying to reach the top of Gotham’s drug trade, he has principles. The Penguin is not subtle on this (or any other) point. “I got a f-ckin’ code!” he says later in the series, in an attempt to convince a group of small-time bosses to unite under his leadership. Further evidence of his magnanimity comes when he takes under his wing a recently orphaned Crown Point teenager, Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz), whom he catches trying to rip the hubcaps off his gaudy purple-and-gold car. And in a Sopranos parallel so obvious it has to be a throwback: Oz features a demanding, dementia-plagued battle-axe of an elderly mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell), who waits impatiently in a drab suburban house for her boy to make something of himself and give her the penthouse-dwelling Gotham high life she’s always craved. Chase didn’t need to give Tony and his mother’s relationship incestuous undertones to convey its toxicity, but for LeFranc, this element serves as a convenient shortcut to convey the same impression.

As the Penguin engineers his rise, he pits the Falcones against their rivals the Maroneys in a dangerous double agent ploy designed to give himself sole control over a new drug called blissAlberto’s sister Sofia (Cristin Milioti) becomes his primary antagonist. Fresh out of Arkham Asylum, Sofia harbors a grudge against the male staff who placed her there, trying to prevent this smart, competent woman from ascending to her rightful place at the head of the family. Despite her distrust of Oz, who was once her chauffeur, her isolation among the Falcones makes her vulnerable to his manipulations. With Farrell operating with such a physical disability that he might as well be playing Grimace, Milioti’s back-against-the-wall performance becomes the clear standout. But for too long, her character development, which wrings female empowerment out of female trauma, is a simplistic one we’ve seen too often before.

As for Oz himself, if you were to guess that he’s an avatar for Donald Trump from an alternate reality, well, thing thing thing thing thing. While The Sopranos astutely predicted a bad end to the American century, capturing an incipient mood of decline more than two years before 9/11, The Penguin presents another unflattering portrait of a man whose archetype has dogged TV and film since his first presidential campaign. Fueled by his own well-founded insecurities, Oz’s demagoguery is on full display in his theatrical appeals to the oppressed and aggrieved, from Vic and Sofia to the working-class gangsters who loathe wealthy elites like the Falcones and the Maroneys even more than they hate each other. “The real power,” he promises potential supporters scared off by his treacherous reputation, “comes when we have each other’s backs.”

The Penguin always gives speeches like this one, laying out his worldview for viewers who spend most episodes scrolling on their phones as the audio washes over them. “Do you still think there’s good and bad, right and wrong?” he sneers at Vic. “There isn’t. There’s only this: Survival. Safety. Fun. They don’t give prizes for people who die in the projects.” The repetition, both within the show and in TV’s fascination with Trumpian villains (see: Scandal‘s Hollis Doyle, A man in his entirety‘s Charlie Croker, Kate Winslet in The Regime), can be maddening. (In this case, the Trump comparison is undermined by Oz’s rise from poverty. Stripped of the former president’s nihilism, his storyline just makes too much sense.) In a letter to critics, LeFranc acknowledged that she struggled with why viewers would want to see more of this archetype before she began to worry about the future of her two young sons and asked herself, “Are bad men born? Or are they made . . . ?” The thing is, The Penguin never answers that question convincingly. And a decade of armchair analysis by the former president yielded diminishing returns long before he left office.

At its best, The Penguin is an effective reminder to believe people when they tell us who they are. Milioti’s performance and deft, noir-tinged direction from talented collaborators like filmmaker Craig Zobel (Z for Zacharias, Compliance) and TV veteran Helen Shaver (Station Eleven, Domestic help) aside, the biggest advantage is the sheer ferocity of LeFranc’s finale. But without the moral nuance that The Sopranos So ripe for contemplation and debate, it’s a drag to get there, weighed down by broad characters spouting comic-book dialogue. The miniseries’ final moments could have had a much greater impact at the end of a feature film that wasn’t forced to fill 10 hours of screen time by staging dozens of superfluous sets, playing out too many unnecessary plot twists and, in both literal and figurative ways, repeating itself.

That’s TV in the revenue-starved, post-streaming-wars landscape of 2024. Too often, what appears on our screens, even in the glossy guise of prestige programming, isn’t a triumph of intelligent, boundary-pushing storytelling. It’s there because executives can count on it to keep subscribers glued to their platforms for entire weekends thanks to big-name actors or big-name IP or the all-ages accessibility of scripts written with precisely zero subtext. (When I spoke to Chase in late 2023, he lamented the sense in today’s TV industry that “there’s a lack of interest … in psychology, ambiguity, spirituality.”) The Penguin is, however you look at it, not the worst new show of the fall. At least it has some style, some point of view, something to say, however corny. (Have you seen yet another budget-friendly adult animated series from Fox? Universal base boys? Fine, don’t do it.) But in its mediocrity, it’s as much an indictment of a declining medium as the dumbest junk the networks have to offer.