When a movie get a TV spinoff, there’s often a noticeable difference in quality. Secret Invasion doesn’t look nearly as big and cinematic as The Marvels, nor does The Continental looks as eye-popping as the John Wick movies. But director Craig Zobel’s aim with The Penguin, for which he helms the first three episodes, was to make the visual transition from The Batman to its HBO spinoff as seamless as possible.

“I was very eager to make it look like the film, at least at the beginning,” Zobel tells Inverse. “Simply because we can now finish watching The Batman on Max and then immediately press another button and start watching The Penguin.”

The Penguin picks up almost immediately after the events of The Batman, with the death of Carmine Falcone (John Turturro in The Batman, Mark Strong in The Penguin) leaving a hole at the top of Gotham’s criminal underworld. Hoping to fill that gap is Falcone’s longtime lieutenant, Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell), a sleazy, ambitious low-level criminal whose hair-trigger temper leads him to murder Falcone’s chosen heir, his alcoholic son Alberto. Now, with Alberto’s sister zeroing in on Oz, the “Penguin,” as he’s mockingly dubbed, launches a scheme to pit the Carmine and Maroni families against each other in a war that will rock an already devastated Gotham.

Inverse spoke with Zobel about why we can’t stop watching Farrell’s Oz Cobb, why the team called the first part of the show a “buddy-cop comedy,” and what Batman rogue his dream TV spinoff would center around.

On most movie sets, the director can seem like a captain steering a massive ship through choppy waters while commanding a crew of dozens (or hundreds) to work as one. But when it comes to making a big superhero movie designed to fit seamlessly into an even bigger cinematic universe, the job of a director is sometimes a little less empowering.

“A producer told us the joke on franchise movies is that they call the director the intern because they're the one person that changes, all the rest of the crew remains the same,” Jon Brown tells Inverse. “Everyone else knows this stuff better than they do.”

Brown, who’s best known for his work as a writer on Succession, is the creator of The Franchise, HBO’s new workplace comedy that takes place on the set of a B-tier superhero movie titled Tecto: Eye of the Storm. Brown worked with Armando Iannucci (Veep) and Sam Mendes (James Bond outings Spectre and Skyfall) to craft perfectly timed satire of the 21st-century’s most enduring cultural legacy: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.