TV Review: Pennyworth (2019). An origin story for one of the most enduring characters of modern fiction.

Image courtesy of Epix

Tv Review: Pennyworth (2019) by Ben Jeffries (26/7/2019)

Season 1 Episode 1 - Pilot (28/7/2019)

72 minutes

Action, Drama,

Pennyworth premieres Sunday, July 28th, 9pm on Epix

Long before the Wayne’s came into his life, Alfred Pennyworth was mixing it up with criminals and conspirators on the streets of London.

Amid the grimy streets and colourful clothes of 1960’s London the young Alfred Pennyworth, formerly of Her Majesty’s SAS, strikes out on his own, looking to make his mark on the world. Alfred’s plan is to set up his own security firm, but at the moment the best he can manage is a position as “security consultant” at a London club called The Velvet Rope. Wearing a bow tie and opening the door for patrons, he’s little more than a glorified bouncer, as his father is quick to point out. While working, a chance meeting with an American man by the name of Thomas Wayne leads to Alfred being caught up in a conspiracy of secret societies and powerful figures struggling for control of England’s future. That chance meeting changes the course of Alfred’s life forever. With it’s English gangster movie styling and a setting decorated with comic book flourishes, Pennyworth wisely distances itself from the tangled web of increasingly tired lore surrounding the property and establishes itself as an origin story with legs for one of the most enduring characters in modern fiction.

Alfred’s character, played here by Jack Bannon (Fury), clearly seems inspired by the version of the character played by Michael Caine in director Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. With a pronounced London accent and a laconic demeanor, Alfred handles each challenge thrown at him with aplomb. Whether he’s facing a pair of thugs in a nightclub, a trench of enemy soldiers in the jungle, or a British Lord with plans for world domination in the sitting room, Alfred maintains his stoic disposition. He’s cool and capable, already the unflappable presence we know from decades of comics, tv, and movies, but he’s also a young man, unsure of his place in the world and looking to make his mark.

While Alfred spends his nights working as a door man and drunk tosser, he lives with his parents in London’s suburbs, his mother a homemaker and his father a butler. The Pennyworths are worried about their son; his mother frets over how dangerous Alfred’s job is as she cleans the blood from a handkerchief, only to be told “Don’t worry Mum, it’s only my blood” in a cute twist on the “it’s not my blood” gag. “That makes it better does it?” she asks. As Alfred’s father dresses for work he encourages his son to look for a position with a good family, pointing out that with his qualifications and skills Alfred could work his way up to the coveted role of butler before the age of 40. Alfred resists the idea, claiming that he wants to be his “own man”. Pennyworth Senior’s response is that “no one is their own man, son.” We, of course, know the way things will shake out for Alfred eventually. Alfred Pennyworth is one of the most famous butlers in all of fiction, but with this obvious denial of the characters inevitable destination, Pennyworth sets up an interesting trajectory for Alfred’s journey to that final position. Importantly, the Alfred of Pennyworth doesn’t seem like a reverse engineered version of the older character: This Alfred has his own quirks and foibles, his own goals and aspirations, and as a result he doesn’t feel like a character on a predictable track toward a predestined conclusion. This is a fresh take on a character, exploring the pre-Wayne era of his life, and elements of Alfred’s story that we haven’t seen before.

While the show may be set in the swinging 60’s, don’t expect the camp tone of Adam West’s Batman years. This is a mature series for an adult audience. With it’s collection of regional accents, colourful characters, and decorative colloquialisms the script has the flavour of a Guy Ritchie crime thriller and the dialogue is punctuated by coarse language as Alfred and his friends casually swear their way through conversations. There’s a bedroom scene (tastefully handled) between Alfred and his new girlfriend Esme, who dances in the cabaret show at The Velvet Rope while trying to make it as an actress. Everyone’s smoking and drinking near constantly, and there’s at least one scene where a character snorts a line of un-named white powder off a table. Pennyworth is also violent, sometimes shockingly so. Alfred is a former Special Air Service soldier, and the deeds of war he committed for Queen and country sit uneasily with him, haunting his memories and dreams. In a flashback sequence of brutal hand-to-hand combat we see Alfred singlehandedly kill three enemy soldiers using only a knife. Returning to his own squad, Alfred shrugs off the gruesome nature of his work by suggesting a tea break. As they squabble good naturedly about who should make the tea one of the men carelessly stands up too far in their trench. He’s killed as a shot from out of the dark jungle strikes him in the temple, waking Alfred from his nightmare with a start. As the events of the episode unfold Alfred, with the help of his surviving SAS buddies, is forced to rely on his military training, and the results are bloody and effective as they engage in a series of deadly shootouts.

All the violence and swearing aside, there is some small measure of that 60’s silliness sprinkled throughout the show. The plot of the episode, and possibly the series, revolves around a pair of secret organisations in a hidden struggle for control of the British Government. On one side is the Raven Society, whose goal is to overthrow the government and establish a fascist utopia while their rivals, who call themselves the No Name League, also want to overthrow the government but with the intention to found a socialist utopia. It’s a simplistic opposition of ideologies which is both very comic book in nature and also oddly timely in the fraught and divided political climate of 2019. The comic book inspired embellishments don’t end there either.

Without any historical knowledge of 1960’s London it’s impossible for me to say how many 100 foot tall industrial chimney’s formed the city’s skyline, but Pennyworth’s London seems to have dozens. Floating between the columns of black smoke that they belch into the sky are blimps advertising various Petroleum products in curly lettering. As Alfred walks the streets on his way to work he passes police officers wearing gas masks and carrying sub-machine guns, a group of shaven headed men heckling a street preacher who warns that “the Beast of Discord is coming”, and people throwing rotten fruit at a man chained in stocks by the road with a sign that reads “I am a thief”. This is not the 1960’s London of our world, but rather some alternate, anachronistically skewed version of the city that never fully recovered from the last great war. The city feels dangerous and volatile, primed with tensions that could snap at any moment, a place where dangerous criminals and hard men go about their rough business with a professional air.

While it’s mix of comic-book embellishments, Guy Ritchie dialogue, and 60’s spy adventure plot creates an interesting backdrop to this origin story, the most interesting thing about Pennyworth is the fact that it’s only tangentially related to the Batman mythos. It’s not set in Gotham, or any of the other DC Comics City States and the physical distance it places between itself and the larger franchise gives Pennyworth room to be it’s own thing. Yes: Thomas Wayne is clearly going to be a major element of this show as he appears throughout the first episode, but we aren’t retreading the same material we’ve seen worn thinner and thinner in the last decade. We aren’t dealing with Oswald Cobblepot Senior, or a teenaged Victor Fries, at least not yet. There’s no mention of a Detective Inspector Gordon from Scotland Yard. The first villain we’re introduced to in Pennyworth is a new character: the delightfully threatening Bet Sykes, played by Paloma Faith, who is by turns unsettlingly businesslike and dangerously unhinged as she goes about her work in a fashionable baby blue overcoat and big blond hair. From the pilot, at least, it seems that Pennyworth is setting itself up as an original story with only ancillary connections to the Batman we’re all so familiar with. Yes: Alfred Pennyworth will become the man who raises the orphaned Bruce Wayne, but this show doesn’t seem in any hurry to start that transformation and that’s an interesting place to be.

Pennyworth is a good looking show with punchy dialogue, a unique aesthetic, and a charming cast. It’s bent view of 60’s London makes for an engaging setting and it’s occasional humour keeps things from feeling overly dour. Jack Bannon is a solid presence on screen as the troubled, ambitious, young Alfred and it will be interesting to see what he does with the character as he grows. If you’ve come to Pennyworth hoping for deep background lore regarding Batman then you might be disappointed, but if a comic influenced 60’s set action drama that tells the story of how Batman’s butler came to work for the Wayne family sounds like fun then this seems like it will fit the bill.

7/10

Pennyworth is Produced by: Warner Horizon Productions

Distributed by: Warner Bros. Television

Created By: Bruno Heller

Written by: Bruno Heller, Danny Cannon

Directed by: Danny Cannon

Starring: Jack Bannon,Emma Corrin, Paloma Faith, Ben Aldridge, Ian Puleston-Davies, Dorothy Atkinson, Ryan Fletcher, Hainsley Lloyd Bennett, Jason Flemyng, Richard Clothier

Executive Producers: Danny Cannon, Bruno Heller

Cinematography: Mark Patten

Music: David E. Russo