Alfred (Jack Bannon), newly returned to civilian life, hopes to use his military training to launch a security business with his fellow commandos Dave Boy (Ryan Fletcher) and Bazza (Hainsley Lloyd Bennett), but in the meantime he’s working as a bouncer at a posh nightclub. It’s there that he meets a visiting American businessman, Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge), not yet the father of a budding caped crusader named Bruce. Wayne is about to become embroiled with the Raven Society, and to drag Albert and his mates in with him.

(Those who pay attention to these things will note that “Pennyworth” offers a modified version of the latter-day mythology from DC Comics’ Earth One story line, in which Alfred makes the birth of Batman possible by saving Thomas Wayne’s life.)

Bannon, who played the son of Inspector Thursday in the “Inspector Morse” prequel “Endeavour,” is a charming, resourceful and alert performer, and his Alfred — with an aggressively pompadoured widow’s peak that embodies the nervous energy of a generation — is a consistently engaging presence at the center of the series. Bannon is well matched by Emma Corrin as Esme, the dance-hall girl and aspiring actress Alfred falls for, and their initial scenes together have a life and a tenderness that you don’t usually get from television romance.

As in “Gotham,” though, Heller and Cannon are better at the setup than at the continuing execution. They want serious, kitchen-sink-style drama, with class conflict and political relevance and poisonous family strife. But they also want, or at least feel required to provide, comic-book exaggeration, with world-ending plot twists and caricatured villains and occasional hyper-violence and gore. That combination may be the selling point in theory, but in practice it’s kind of a drag — rather than amplifying or enriching each other, the straight-ahead drama and the comic contrivances cancel each other out. It’s harder to take either one seriously in the presence of the other.

It doesn’t help that so far the villains of “Pennyworth” — Jason Flemyng as an Oswald Mosley-style aristocrat, Paloma Faith as his psycho flunky — are a somewhat dull lot, without the baroque flourishes of Robin Lord Taylor’s Penguin or Cory Michael Smith’s Riddler in “Gotham.” Bannon’s doing good work, but he could use some help, and this time Batman is definitely not coming to the rescue.

Pennyworth

Sundays on Epix