The Punisher Review

Bernthal does something rare with this character: he plays the violence as a symptom rather than a fantasy, so the killing scenes are not cathartic, they are the behaviour of a man who cannot stop. The scenes that stay are the quiet ones, Frank swinging a sledgehammer at a wall for hours, or sitting across from Ebon Moss-Bachrach's Micro watching a family he destroyed eat dinner on a surveillance feed. That relationship, two damaged men reluctantly keeping each other alive, is the best thing in the show.

The series also takes returning soldiers seriously in a way American television usually will not, giving Jason R. Moore and Daniel Webber arcs about men whose country has no plan for them. Where it stumbles is plot. The first season buries Frank inside a government conspiracy involving heroin smuggling and a corrupt operation in Kandahar, delivered through flashbacks that keep withholding the same information, and the second season loses its shape entirely around a runaway teenager and a religious assassin. Thirteen episodes is at least four too many.