'The Penguin' Waddles To Ratings Success On HBO Heading Into Finale
The Colin Farrell-starring limited series set between 'The Batman' and its 2026 sequel wraps up on Sunday
Agatha All Along may already be over, airing 9 episodes in 7 weeks on Disney+, but The Penguin, which premiered the day after, is now heading to its fiery finale. It aired strictly single episodes weekly on HBO, so it had linear ratings reports every week, as opposed to the opening and closing doubles of the former series rolled out only on a streaming service. And this Penguin, in this TV environment? It’s growing.
The seventh episode, titled “Top Hat”, reached a series high of 1.9 million cross-platform American viewers across HBO and Max on Sunday night, according to Warner Bros. Discovery. That is a 6% same-day audience increase in the last two weeks. It seems the anticipation for the finale has generated quite a bit in rewatches and catchups as well, that the week leading up to “Top Hat” was The Penguin’s strongest-performing domestic week on the streamer. The limited series’s first episode has now amassed over 16 million viewers, which is two million more than the initial viewership report for the episode.
The Penguin has not appeared on Nielsen’s streaming charts, the most recent report spanning the week of September 30 to October 6, which was between episodes two, titled “Inside Man” and three, titled “Bliss”. Since it isn’t a Max original, it is considered acquired programming, which means it’s competing against Fox and ABC shows on Hulu and Disney+, NBC shows on Peacock, and everything else that isn’t originals, whether same-day, next-day, or already-sitting library stuff. Still, that second week managed 364 million viewing minutes, which means if it had been an original, it would’ve been #9. With four weeks to catch up on, which will soon encompass the entire remainder of the series, it seems the steady rise will contijue to be heard about.
“Top Hat”, following plenty of flashbacks, sees Sal Maroni, played by Clancy Brown, beating down Oswald Cobb, played by Colin Farrell, with a golf club in Oz’s apartment, still understandably enraged after Oz murdered his wife and son. Brown spoke about the episode following its release, saying “At this point, Sal has tunnel vision. All he wants to do is kill Oz. If he could shoot Oz in the head, and then somebody shot [Sal] in the head, he would die a happy man. He is just so full of rage and hatred for Oz Cobb at that point, I don’t think anything else exists. I don’t think he has any designs to take out Sofia and he doesn’t care at all about the Gigante and Maroni alliance. I don’t think he cares a whit about that. He’s just using that in order to get to Oz, to kill him.” He and Farrell wanted to make the beating as real as possible, though he admits they went quite far, maybe too far with it.
“At first, Colin thought and I thought, ‘Well, you know, [Colin’s] padded up pretty well,’ so Colin said ‘Just go for it.’ So I did. And you know, a couple takes after that, he pulled me aside and said, ‘Okay, don’t go for it so much,'” Brown remarked, laughing. “I was really trying to break the club.” One of Sofia Falcone's (the highly-lauded Cristin Milioti) goons intervenes in the attempted kill, leading to a taunting match where Sal is baited just enough to grab gasoline when another goon stops him from using it. Of course, Brown knows the character’s mindset. “He was gonna burn him,” he said. “He was gonna burn him slow. He was going to dismember him and burn him. He was definitely going to pour gasoline on him and make him smell his own flesh burning. Just the most painful thing that he could imagine.”
While there were plans to take the scene further than it ultimately went, practical reasons rather than moral ones prevented it: “I think it was actually in the script for a minute that he was going to douse Oz with gasoline after he talks about Nadia, and how Nadia smelled, but it became an impractical thing to do because of the makeup,” Brown remarked. “You can’t pour gasoline on the makeup, obviously. You can really ruin it by even pouring water on it, because it would absorb all the water and eventually get waterlogged and be even more miserable for Colin to wear.” Sal and Oz begin to brawl in a manner that brings them inside an old trolley car. At first, Sal has the upper hand. Suddenly clutching his left arm and gasping for breath, Sal finds himself in the throes of a fatal heart attack.
“I thought it was a great joke,” Brown said of the character’s death. “That’s in there in order to add another little layer of frustration onto Oz. Oz is a beast like Sal, and he needs to kill in a way that is satisfying for him. And that was very unsatisfying.” The death of Maroni is soon brought to echo for Oz, flashing back to how things were after his brothers died. The episode ends with Oz visiting the debris and wreckage in Crown Point, encountering corrupt Det. Marcus Wise, who knocks Oz unconscious to take him to Sofia.
The Penguin also stars Rhenzy Feliz, Theo Rossi, Michael Kelly, and Shohreh Aghdashloo. It is executive produced by Matt Reeves, Dylan Clark, Farrell, Bill Carrara, Craig Zobel, director of the first three episodes, and Lauren LeFranc, who serves as writer and showrunner. It is a DC Studios production which finishes Sunday, November 10 at 9 PM ET/PT on HBO and available for streaming simultaneously on Max. The finale’s trailer can be watched below. It will be succeeded in its timeslot by Dune: Prophecy, which too was originally a Max original, the following Sunday November 17.
