What can Star Wars learn from the Penguin?

I recently binged The Penguin on Max. If you haven’t watched it, I’d recommend checking it out. Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti are excellent. The whole damn cast for that matter, though it’s tough for me to watch Con O’Neill in a serious role because I love him so much as Izzy in Our Flag Means Death. But that’s a me problem.

One of the main reasons I loved the show was that while it was definitely a DC show and there are characters you know from that universe, it’s simply a really good mob story. It doesn’t try very hard to weave in comic book characters as there are just a ton of regular ass people in this show. The story would work if you renamed the characters to non-comic book characters. Additionally, they don’t have the “good guys”, the “heroes” in this show.

When Star Wars announced they were going to do episodic shows and The Mandalorian was the first out of the gates, a lot of people assumed we’d finally get the Star Wars Underworld show that almost happened a couple of decades ago. The Solo movie started to dabble into it. Rogue One originated in the storylines of the Underworld show. And there have definitely been glimpses of what it could have been in almost everything Dave Filoni touches.

Even in the grittier and grounded Andor, there is a pretty clear good guys vs bad guys match up. Book of Boba Fett could have taken a full-on Underworld approach, but alas, Boba and Fennec somehow become “good guys”.

I hope that Star Wars sees the success of an all villain show in the seedy underworld and reacts. There doesn’t need to be a hero, just give us a great anti-hero. They have been able to accomplish this in the books and comics. They also recently released the video game Star Wars Outlaws, which is heavy into the criminal syndicates. There are characters that could easily work for this: Maul, Doctor Aphra, Qi’ra, Prince Xizor. I think it could be excellent and the accolades for the Penguin should show Disney it’s also profitable.

-Chorizy-E

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