{"id":41112,"date":"2017-11-26T06:00:03","date_gmt":"2017-11-26T11:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41112"},"modified":"2017-11-26T12:59:29","modified_gmt":"2017-11-26T17:59:29","slug":"the-punisher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41112","title":{"rendered":"TV I’m Watching: The Punisher"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Netflix Punisher series came out recently. I guess I liked it. I can’t think of anything major that I disliked, anyway. It’s not a bad show, but it’s bad at being a comic book show. <\/p>\n

For those of you who never really got into this particular antihero: The Punisher is a guy named Frank Castle. He’s basically a distillation of all the revenge fantasy tropes. His family was murdered by the mob, and so he returns to his roots as a special ops badass soldier to hunt down the guilty and kill them all. He’s a bit like a murderous version of Batman. He’s stoic, he wears all black, he’s driven by guilt and rage, and in the comics he does a lot of inner monologue stuff to walk you through his plans. By hunting down despicable predators and bringing them to justice, both characters feed into the same desire for cathartic fantasy justice. The only difference is that Batman puts them in jail where they will miraculously escape, while the Punisher kills them and they’re miraculously replaced by someone just as dangerous.<\/p>\n

I haven’t read a lot of Punisher over the years, but the best ones seem to map to your typical 80s cop shows \/ movies.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Introduce a bad guy and make us hate him.\n
  2. Have the hero track him down. They face off, but the bad guy escapes or wins so we hate him even more.\n
  3. At the finale they face off again and the hero brings him to justice.<\/ol>\n

    That three-act structure makes for a really good TV episode or movie. It guarantees the audience will always get both drama and action. But for some reason, this isn’t how Netflix has decided to run their superhero shows.<\/p>\n

    GO PUT ON YOUR COSTUME AND SHOOT SOME BAD GUYS YA BIG MOPE.<\/div>
    GO PUT ON YOUR COSTUME AND SHOOT SOME BAD GUYS YA BIG MOPE.<\/div><\/p>\n

    Instead of making each episode a self-contained story with a clear arc and dramatic payoff, they make a gigantic soap opera. Sure, the “bring the bad guys to justice” story is in there, but it’s diluted over 13 episodes that clock in at just under an hour. So to fill time there are side-stories and a large cast of secondary characters for us to follow around. The Punisher is a character designed for action and here they have him in a drama with glacial pacing. <\/p>\n

    In the entire series, we only get to see the Punisher once<\/strong>. Sure, we see lots of Frank Castle moping around, punching people, and doing the occasional shooting, but that’s like watching Bruce Wayne getting into fistfights. It’s not the same thing. The Punisher doesn’t really show up until episode 12 when he finally puts on the costume and has to take out a warehouse full of dudes using his cunning, experience, and forethought. <\/p>\n

    Netflix has realized that without the normal constraints of television, they’re free to make long-running serialized stories. That’s great, but not all stories benefit from that. In fact, a lot of comic book heroes were designed around the more short-form type storytelling: Introduce a bad guy, show us his plan, have the hero stop it.<\/em> Even when comics do have long-running plots, they’re usually running in the background while the storyteller does the standard “villain of the week” type stuff in the foreground. <\/p>\n

    I think this is the big shortcoming of the Netflix Marvel stuff. They have characters built for short stories and they’re trying to tell soap operas about them. The runtime is filled with poe-faced characters having dreary conversations. The few action scenes we do get are unevenly spaced and often unsatisfying because the writer can’t afford to let the plot move forward. <\/p>\n

    I would have liked it a lot better if they took this 13 episode revenge plot, pulled out all the padding, and turned it into a two-episode story. They could have filled the other 11 episodes with similar one or two episode stories. Some stories work really well as long-form dramas<\/a>, but I don’t think that includes costumed crimefighters.<\/p>\n

    I said at the start of the article that I liked the show, but in the course of writing this I’ve basically talked myself out of it. The show is getting a lot of praise in the circles I follow, but if Netflix dropped another 13 episodes right now I would not be in a hurry to start watching. Thirteen episodes is a long time to wait for the resolution to the central conflict, and the journey itself isn’t terribly witty or exciting.<\/p>\n

    No, Netflix doesn’t need<\/strong> to follow the standard one-hour episode format of classic television. But maybe there are times when they should. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Netflix Punisher series came out recently. I guess I liked it. I can’t think of anything major that I disliked, anyway. It’s not a bad show, but it’s bad at being a comic book show. For those of you who never really got into this particular antihero: The Punisher is a guy named Frank […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[608],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}