The Penguin

Essential within this continuity, and watch The Batman first: it opens days after that film's flood, with the power vacuum it created, and the city's state is the premise.

It is a crime series with a superhero nowhere in it. Batman does not appear. What it is instead is a story about a middle-ranking gangster with a limp and no standing, who is cleverer than anybody gives him credit for and is also a liar, a coward and eventually something much worse. The series is unusually willing to let its protagonist be genuinely unlikeable.

Cristin Milioti is the reason to watch it. Sofia Falcone is a woman committed to Arkham for ten years for crimes her father committed, and the fourth episode, which leaves the main plot entirely to tell her story, is the best hour of television DC has produced. The performance is extraordinary and won an Emmy.

Colin Farrell is unrecognisable under prosthetics and the makeup never becomes the performance. The series is slow in places and the ending is as bleak as anything in the catalogue. It leads directly into the next film in this continuity.