Earlier on Wednesday, I wrote a review for the first episode of "The Penguin," a MAX miniseries that follows around the Batman villain, Oz Cobb, aka "The Penguin." I can't heap enough praise on it, as it's a tightly written plot with fantastic characters. As one of my readers described it, "It's The Godfather meets The Sopranos meets Batman," and it works.
READ: 'The Penguin' Review: I Might Have Found My New Favorite Show
For all intents and purposes, "The Penguin" is being considered a major success, and it only has one episode to its name. Yet, fans of the failed show "The Acolyte" are making comparisons in terms of viewership, saying their failed Star Wars show scored way more eyeballs than "The Penguin" and it was considered a failure from the word go.
Paul Tassi of Forbes, regardless of what you might think of his tastes, wrote a very good commentary on this, explaining that the "success" of the Penguin boils down to cost vs. viewership:
With the debut of The Penguin, HBO bragged that it got 5.3 million viewers in its first four days. The Acolyte fans correctly noted that the Star Wars series instead got 11.1 million viewers over five days. The idea here is that Penguin is being considered a big hit, but The Acolyte is a “failure” that ended up being cancelled.
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But viewership is not the only factor, as what was the biggest issue of all was the bloated budget Disney devoted to The Acolyte. We do not know how much The Penguin cost HBO, but it is presumably less than the incredibly VFX-heavy Acolyte that reportedly had a budget of $180 million, or $630,000 per minute of screen time. No one, even fans, understood how the show cost that much or should have cost that much. As a hugely expensive project drawing on zero known Star Wars characters, the viewership it would have need to have was almost impossibly high. This is mainly a problem with Disney budget bloat.
Tassi's not wrong, but he's not really covering the big picture here.
The reason "The Penguin" is considered a success despite its lower viewership is because of its projected longevity. People really want to see the next episode whereas after the first episode of "The Acolyte" people were already checking out. By the time it was done, the show had 75 percent fewer viewed minutes than all other Star Wars shows, save one.
(READ: The Numbers Are in for Star Wars 'The Acolyte' and Disney Isn't Going to Be Happy)
But why is "The Penguin" attracting, where "The Acolyte" was repelling?
Simple. It's respect.
"The Penguin" is showing respect in many regards. It respects the Batman canon despite taking a somewhat fresh twist on Oswald Cobblepot. It respects the audience's time and intelligence. It respects why they're there in the first place.
The show isn't there to preach to you. It's not there to check boxes. It's not there as a self-insert for the creators. "The Penguin" tells a tight, focused story with believable characters who are there because they serve the plot, and behave in ways that they should behave in their situations.
Compare that to "The Acolyte," which swaps between infantilizing the audience and pushing messaging to them. Characters will sometimes serve no point except to check a box, and the decisions they make are entirely bizarre. It doesn't respect the viewers' time as it throws in a lot of filler non-events where entire episodes go by with very little happening.
Moreover, it disrespects the established lore that Star Wars fans have come to know and love, in essence, causing the show to disrespect itself. In fact, it would be best if Disney made the decision to de-canonize the show entirely in order to erase the complications it brought about to that universe's logic.
It's just a disrespectful show all around. This is why it was called a loser after its first lap while The Penguin is already being hailed as a candidate for the winner's circle after just one episode.
It's that simple. If many other corporations would take a page out of this chapter that WB just started, they'd find themselves in good spots.
