Lauren LeFranc is at her strongest when damaged people are trying to get something from one another. The Penguin gives us good reason to follow her work, though she can spend too long explaining what her actors have already made clear.
Fi1m perspective
Colin Farrell keeps trying to make Oz Cobb sound reasonable in The Penguin (2024). We were unsettled by that effort to win us over: creator and writer Lauren LeFranc gives him an ugly hunger for respect and lets it drive his struggle for power. She gives Farrell a clear want to pursue, with enough complication to keep the man interesting across eight episodes. It is good character writing, though the gangland plotting around it is familiar. LeFranc is worth following for what happens between people, with some patience required for the explanations.
Chuck (2007), which she wrote for from 2010 to 2012, offers fewer grounds for separating her work from everyone else's. We liked the spy comedy's charm even as its formula wore thin, but there is no reason to assign either quality to one member of its writing team. Her writing and producing on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013) came before she ran Impulse (2018). The move from contributing scripts to overseeing a programme matters when assessing a writer: responsibility for the whole becomes clearer. With The Penguin, she was both creator and showrunner.
The central performances by Farrell and Cristin Milioti are more interesting than some of the manoeuvring around them. LeFranc and her writing team handle immediate contests between people better than the flashbacks, which too often explain damage the actors have already made clear. Editors Meg Reticker, Henk van Eeghen and Andy Keir keep the plot's turns legible, but cannot disguise the slow opening. A return to the past can hold up a story just as it has begun to grip.
LeFranc has said of Oz, “I wanted him to be a villain through and through.” That helps explain why the writing lets us understand his hunger without asking us to like him. We do not need every difficult character softened, and her willingness to stay with this one is a virtue. We recommend The Penguin for Farrell and Milioti, despite the patience its slow opening demands.
Biography
Lauren LeFranc is an American television writer, producer and showrunner. She began her career writing for My Own Worst Enemy (2008) and joined the writing staff of Chuck (2007) in 2009, contributing scripts and serving as story editor and executive story editor across later seasons.
She later worked as a writer and producer on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–2016) and Hemlock Grove (2013). In 2018 she was executive producer and showrunner on the YouTube Premium series Impulse. LeFranc wrote for, produced and served as showrunner on the 2024 limited series The Penguin.
