SERIES PREMIERE: The latest Marvel series to appear on Netflix has gotten a head-start: Jon Bernthal, who plays this particular brutal and haunted antihero, first portrayed the Punisher in a season of Netflix’s Daredevil, occupying the major story line as a former soldier seeking revenge for the mob-related deaths of his family. This new spinoff, therefore, doesn’t have to spend a lot of time establishing the superhero’s origin story – good thing, because the Punisher, technically, is not super, and arguably isn’t much of a hero, more of a heavily armed and driven vigilante. But Bernthal, who rose to stardom in The Walking Dead, is excellent at portraying both angst and strength, and lends a little depth to a comic-book title that, frankly, needs it. And Deborah Ann Woll, whose own ride to stardom came in another genre series, True Blood, continues her Daredevil role as Karen Page – one of the few people in that show’s story arc who believed in, or at least empathized with, the man known as the Punisher. So now, together, their story continues.