The Marvel Cinematic Universe rolls ever onward, whether the average viewer can possibly watch all of it or not. And now, the small screen has become the place to watch the bulk of MCU storytelling. Can’t keep it all straight? Ken Lowe is revisiting every MCU TV show—the good, the bad and the non-canon—in our ongoing feature, Streaming Marvel. You can follow along with the whole series here. This month: Marvel’s rage-fueled black sheep, and the bane of film adaptations—The Punisher.
There is no reason it should be so difficult to just adapt the Punisher to the screen. He has no superpowers to keep FX company employees awake and away from their spouses and children for months on end. His costume isn’t some spandex monstrosity. He doesn’t have a lavish Fortress of Solitude or Bat Cave to retreat to. Depending on when you’re reading him, he’s either a Vietnam or a War on Terror veteran who returned home only to witness his family gunned down by mobsters (or drug traffickers, or whoever we dislike the most lately). His sole resource is his hyper-competency: Frank Castle is simply a ruthless warfighter, deadly in any circumstance and an expert in every conceivable weapon. He survives physical trauma not because he has an adamantium skeleton or the proportionate strength and agility of a spider, but because he is too damn angry to die.
And his stories are the definition of straightforward: In nearly all of the best Punisher arcs, the villain is usually just a criminal whose violence or impunity demand retribution. And as always, Frank is all too ready to provide it.
That, ultimately, is the obvious reason that adaptations have been either squeamish or poorly funded or seemingly abandoned by their studios. In the preface to a volume collecting the comic book arc that began with Welcome Back, Frank, writer Garth Ennis said that he would never, under any circumstances, attempt to defend what the Punisher does. That’s fine. I love the Punisher as a character—he may be the character whose books I’ve actually read the most, when it comes to Marvel. I can’t defend him, either. And if I can’t, and Garth Ennis can’t, the precious folks who constitute the average Hollywood C-suite exec certainly aren’t going to have much to contribute to the conversation, either.
Perhaps for that reason, we’ve had three previous attempts to embody Castle in live action features before, in the form of Punisher movies in 1989 (Dolph Lundgren, cheesily fun but racist), 2004 (Thomas Jane, low rent but earnest), and 2008 (Ray Stevenson, absolutely gonzo but missing something). None of them succeeded in kicking off a successful series, and only 2008’s The Punisher: War Zone really let Frank shoot as many guns as the character demands. All of them, in one way or another, felt like their hands were tied by limited budgets, uninspired interpretations of the character, or just an unwillingness to let the Punisher off the leash. This is a character whose body count is somewhere in the tens of thousands.
In its two brief seasons (and in Jon Bernthal’s appearances in Daredevil, as we’ve mentioned), Netflix’s The Punisher finally took a definitive step toward a Frank Castle and a Punisher story that finally seemed right. The 2017-2019 series on Netflix felt so right, in fact, that it has bumped up very uncomfortably to the simple fact that we are living in a time when the worst people in the country love the Punisher, unironically wearing his skull logo to signify that they, too, have no use for things like judges or juries. The return of Bernthal in Daredevil: Born Again pushes back against that in the most splattery, cop-killing way possible—more than once, watching the Season 1 finale of Born Again earlier this month, I found myself astounded that something with the Disney imprint let some of this violence slide. But it also shows Bernthal’s Castle in just two episodes, with little context for what he is or isn’t doing hiding out in a basement in New York.
It operates in that queasy space even as Bernthal’s Punisher wasn’t quite allowed to hit his stride.
The Show
Jon Bernthal’s Punisher first shows up in Season 2 of Netflix’s Daredevil, a rip-roaring debut that immediately caused fans of the character to rub their hands together. The Frank Castle who appears in the Netflix series is a hulking, heedless killer, made of meat and murder. We don’t even see his face until he’s already mulched an entire chapter of the Irish mob and gone on a rampage through a hospital trying to kill the only man unlucky enough to survive that massacre. He splatters bikers, he splatters mobsters, and, after he purposely allows himself to be imprisoned, he splatters an entire cell block of thugs in the employ of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin.
Everything about this interpretation of the character was perfect. Castle is a single-minded obsessive, a traumatized survivor, a man whose principles are so unyielding that they seem to exhaust even him. In one scene, he is almost out the door after buying up a gym bag worth of illicit materials from a skeezy pawnbroker. The pawnbroker makes the fatal error of mentioning that he’s also got child porn available for sale. Castle stops, and we only see some body language from Bernthal as he seems to heave a silent sigh and flip the OPEN sign to CLOSED. It’s the same annoyance you or I might feel when, checking the tires on a bicycle, we notice the chain needs to be replaced.
In order to be up to speed on The Punisher before you begin, you’ll need to get through Daredevil Season 2, which ends in Frank discovering that his family’s deaths weren’t just random gangland violence, but a setup by his former superior, Schoonover (Clancy Brown, punished at the end of his Daredevil appearance but present in flashbacks in this show). Season 1 of The Punisher opens with a series of killings as Frank cleans up the men he believes were responsible for his family’s murders. Afterward, he hangs up the skull shirt and weapons and retires to a boring construction job. His coworkers, the dumbest men alive, repeatedly pick on him and engage in criminal activity. Bernthal silently takes the abuse until an innocent is about to pay the price, and then he goes back to what he does best. Before long, he’s wiping out a mob’s gambling den—an action which catches the attention of the fugitive hacker David Lieberman (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), known to his informants as “Microchip.” He’s not an exact analog of the comic character who has served as the Punisher’s handler and fixer, but Moss-Bachrach never turns in a bad performance and it’s an interesting reinterpretation of the character.
In this version, Micro and Frank are at odds for most of the show—for an annoyingly long time, honestly. Micro contacts Frank with a proposition: Whoever killed the Punisher’s family was covering up something even more awful that Micro found out about. Micro will help him hunt down the truly true people behind his family’s murder in exchange for helping Micro clear his name with the federal government. Key to this is working with Dinah Madani (Amber Rose Revah), who is (sigh) a Dept. of Homeland Security agent whose career has been sidelined for asking the same questions Micro was.
Does this sound too complicated? It is. As in Netflix’s entire stable of street-level Marvel hero shows, the performances here are all better than okay and the cast has real chemistry together. The unfortunate side effect is that a lot of focus is taken off of Frank, or just goes in weird directions. At one point, it seems like Frank is going to steal Micro’s wife, whom he has allowed to believe he’s dead for his family’s own safety.
For all that, the show also features some grade-A punishment once the real plot at its center finally comes into focus. Frank and Micro discover that they are on the hunt for a crooked CIA spook they’ve codenamed “Agent Orange” (Paul Schulze). Agent Orange smuggled tons of heroin out of Afghanistan and had his filthy black ops outfit murder anybody who asked questions about it. To Frank’s dismay, he also discovers that his war buddy Billy Russo (Ben Barnes, fresh off of being just as perfectly hateful a shit in Westworld) was in on it, too. There’s an entire subplot with Russo romancing Madani, and it’s good, but it also, again, takes away the focus from Frank, who has way more reason to kill the guy.
Season 1 features a number of blazing gunfights and top-tier Punisher rampages. Bernthal screams like a wounded brown bear as gore and brass rain down. Agent Orange and Billy Russo are both that particularly, deliciously hateable type of villain—arrogant, self-righteous, and desperately protecting an empire as they are forced to watch the hero inexorably burn it all down. If the show 24 marks the beginning of the War on Terror on TV, The Punisher probably marks its end, as Frank finally lays hands on Agent Orange and makes him deader than anybody has ever been dead before.
Season 1 ends with one final confrontation between Russo and Castle, of course. Devotees of the comics will recognize Russo’s name as that of Punisher baddie Jigsaw (or one of his names—the character has had a lot of origins). The final bout doesn’t go well for Russo’s face. A new status quo is established: Since Frank has cleaned up the government’s mess, they quietly furnish him with a clean identity and send him on his way. We last see him summoning up the courage to speak up in a group therapy setting for veterans run by another war buddy, Curtis (Jason Moore).
Season 2 takes a muddier turn for a show that was already in need of some sharper focus. An itinerant Frank seems as if he’s about ready to settle down and give family life a try again when random trouble walks into a bar with him. Teen hacker Amy (Giorgia Whigham) is on the run from shadowy special ops assassins who decide to try to violently abduct her in the middle of a crowded public place, and persist even after Frank has knocked out most of their teeth. It’s precisely the cool judgment and situational awareness that most of the baddies in this season display as Frank earns the wayward girl’s trust and learns that her circle of black hat hackers were employed to blackmail a politician who is the son of a religious power couple. They send their hitman, a creepy Bible guy (Josh Stewart) named “John” who seems to be based off of the comic character “the Mormon.” (He isn’t Mormon in this, or doesn’t explicitly seem to be. The show elides the precise religion of its religious nut villains.)
This is barely half the season, however. In a series of events that snowballs from “out of character” to “seriously, girl, Ben Barnes isn’t even that hot,” Russo has returned from a coma as a dissociative mess with a tastefully scarred face. Madani is obsessed with him to the point of endangering her career, and his therapist, Krista (Floriana Lima), decides to throw her entire life away to become his loyal girlfriend as he goes on a spree of bank robberies with a new crew of disaffected former vets. Frank and Amy literally take a break from tangling with the conspiracy affecting her life to come back to New York and deal with Russo, who is called “Jigsaw” maybe once.
The individual performances and some action scenes in this second season are pretty good, but it’s a confused and unfocused sophomore effort for the show. It seems like the creators knew they had to get Frank on track to being, you know, the Punisher, before they had the whole enterprise yoinked away from them by Disney in the interest of vertically integrating everything into their new Disney Plus. The last scene of Season 2 is a baffling non sequitur in which two stereotypical gangs who are dressed as if they belong in a Tom Green sketch meet in an abandoned warehouse to argue for a moment before they both realize they’ve actually been called there by the Punisher.
There is nothing in the preceding season that would lead this Frank Castle to decide his goal in life is to waste street criminals. He has so far killed people named in the 9/11 Commission Report, dumb private military contractors, dumb assassins, dumb boogaloo enthusiasts, and dumb rich megachurch owners. It’s a dissonant note to go out on, one the character’s handlers haven’t quite harmonized yet: Frank has graduated to killing dumb racist cops, but we still haven’t seen him just point himself at a criminal enterprise for no other reason than that it is criminal. It’s still personal for him, and one fascinating facet of the character in the comics is that it’s usually purely clinical.
The Shenanigans
See our entry on Daredevil: Disney just could not abide Netflix continuing to make money off of these trademarked characters. Better to make no money at all for six years as everybody sits around wondering why the hell we aren’t seeing Jon Bernthal punish anybody. The guy is good at it.
What’s Next?
Check out Daredevil: Born Again’s blood-soaked finale for Bernthal’s rip-roaring return to the skull shirt. Hopefully, it signals another season in the near future, one where Castle finally settles into the groove that has so far eluded him in his solo outings.
Tier Ranking
By virtue of the same sharp character work and good ensemble chemistry that carried nearly all of the Netflix shows, and in light of the frustrating lack of focus on the Punisher in his own show, this one staggers into the B-tier, covered in blood but ready to keep fighting.
Next month, Streaming Marvel returns for a look at the origins of one Thunderbolts character in the Disney Plus original The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste TV. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social. To support his fiction, join his Patreon.
