Cristin Miloti’s Sofia Falcone Is the Best Female TV Character of 2024 (Golden Issue Awards)

The underestimated and untamed heiress to a crime famiglia, a covenless witch, and a finger-biting vault dweller are but a few of the female performances that made 2024 yet another riveting year in television. Whether it was Kate Winslet’s reign over an autocracy (in HBO’s The Regime), Jodie Foster’s hardened Alaskan police chief investigating a case of missing scientists (in True Detective: Night Country), or Sofía Vergara’s Colombian drug boss (in Netflix’s Griselda) — all performances nominated at the 2025 Golden Globes — it was a super duper year for female-fronted TV.

With comic book and video game adaptations like DC’s The Penguin, Marvel’s Agatha All Along, and Prime Video’s Fallout dominating geekdom on the television front, ComicBook staff made their picks for the best female character as part of the 2024 ComicBook Golden Issue Awards. But first, honorable mentions go to the leading ladies of two shows that wrapped up this year: Sonequa Martin-Green’s Captain Michael Burnham (Star Trek: Discovery) and Elizabeth Tulloch’s super-woman Lois Lane (in Superman & Lois).

This year’s nominees include Kathryn Hahn, who reprised her WandaVision role as the spellbound witch Agatha Harkness in Marvel Television’s Agatha All Along; Ella Purnell, who was more than “okey dokey” as the naive but good-natured Lucy MacLean in the Fallout TV show; Cristin Milioti, whose Bat-baddie Sofia Falcone became an internet obsession as the scorned daughter of a Gotham gangster in The Penguin; Anna Sawai as the translator Toda Mariko, “Lady of Steel” from Shogun; and Amandla Stenberg’s dual roles as twin sisters Osha and Mae Aniseya in Star Wars: The Acolyte.

And the winner of the 2024 ComicBook.com Golden Issue Award for Best Female TV Character is…

Cristin Miloti as Sofia Falcone in The Penguin.

The supposedly-insane daughter of Gotham City crime boss Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong, replacing John Turturro in flashbacks), Sofia is heir to the Falcone crime Family after the events of 2022’s The Batman. Physically and mentally scarred after spending a decade in Arkham State Hospital, a just-released Sofia sought revenge on the people who put her there: aspiring kingpin Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) and the Falcones, including uncle-turned-don Luca (Scott Cohen) and underboss Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly).

At first believed to be the woman-slaying serial killer known as “The Hangman,” Penguin revealed Sofia was poised to inherit her father’s crime empire as the head of the Family before Oz — once her father’s driver turned soldier — betrayed Sofia. Carmine framed Sofia for his Hangman murders, faked her mental illness, and had his daughter remanded to Arkham alongside lunatics like Magpie (Marié Botha).

Manhandled and subjected to excruciating electroshock therapy, Sofia suffered the sins of her father as she was driven to madness inside the prison that would eventually be known for two of its most infamous inmates: Bat-villains the Riddler (Paul Dano) and the Joker (Barry Keoghan).

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and few women have been scorned and scarred like Sofia. After the Falcones had her committed for her father’s crimes, and Oz killed her dear brother Alberto (Michael Zegen), Sofia found herself in a brewing gang war. And as so many have done before, Oz underestimated Sofia, who went on to become his chief rival for control of Gotham’s underworld.

Oz dipped his beak into the Falcone-Maroni feud to make a play for Gotham’s drug trade and fill the power vacuum left by Carmine’s death, taking Vic (Rhenzy Feliz) under his wing as he manipulated the gang war. At one point, in a seething tone, Sofia taunted Oz: “I just wonder how you see me. If I am more than a thing to play with.”

The doe-eyed Milioti expressed an abused and broken Sofia’s descent into madness with unsettling aplomb, going from traumatized and terrified inmate to ice-cold and calculating mob boss in a cat-and-mouse game with Farrell’s increasingly monstrous Oz. When Sofia rechristened herself Sofia Gigante — her mother’s maiden name — she formed an alliance with Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown) and severed ties with her father’s legacy. In one of the most memorable moments of the season, a liberated Sofia, strutting around a mansion in a yellow gown, got her long-awaited revenge after she gassed the Falcones to the tune of Sarah Vaughn’s “So Long My Love.”

“Daddy is dead, and we are untamed,” said Sofia Gigante, who later mused about her father’s victims, including herself. “Victims are so quickly forgotten, aren’t they? Our stories are rarely told.”

The tragedy of Sofia Falcone is a story that won’t be forgotten any time soon, one told with ferocity and fearlessness by Milioti — and a story we hope continues in The Batman Part II.

Best Female TV Character Nominees:

• Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn, Agatha All Along)
• Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell, Fallout)
• Sofia Falcone (Cristin Millioti, The Penguin) — WINNER 
• Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai, Shogun)
• Osha and Mae (Amandla Stenberg, Star Wars: The Acolyte)