Jon Bernthal is coming back to television! After ending his three-year run as Frank Castle, a.k.a. Punisher, on Netflix’s Daredevil and The Punisher in 2019, the actor hasn’t been in too many TV shows. Now, he is teaming up with the creator of The Wire for a new series and it sounds perfect.
Jon Bernthal, Josh Charles and Jamie Hector have been cast as the leads of HBO’s new limited series, We Own This City, per Deadline. The series comes from The Wire’s creator David Simon and producer George Pelecanos, with Reinaldo Marcus Green set to direct and executive produce the series, which is based on Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton’s book We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption.
We Own This City is a six-hour limited series that will chronicle the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, as well as the corruption and moral collapse that “befell an American city” where the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the police work’s expense. The Punisher actor is set to play Sgt. Wayne Jenkins of the BPD, the central figure in the federal corruption case that centered on the agency’s Gun Trace Task Force, a plainclothes unit that went rogue and began hunting and robbing citizens and drug dealers alike as decades of a drug war and mass incarceration in Baltimore spun out of control.
We Own This City will mark Jon Bernthal and Reinaldo Marcus Green’s third collaboration, following WB’s King Richard, which will release in November, and Amazon drama series The Bottoms, which Bernthal created, stars in and co-writes. Meanwhile, Wire creator David Simon has seven other projects in development, and most of his titles are HBO properties, so he’ll be adding yet another one to that growing list.
While Jon Bernthal is getting ready for a new project, he will always be Frank Castle. Last fall, when asked if there was a matter of when The Punisher would be coming back, he didn’t say it wouldn’t or that it would. As the character and the show will always be part of him, Bernthal expressed interest in returning, if given the choice. With Charlie Cox rumored to be appearing as Matt Murdock/Daredevil in the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home movie, it’s entirely possible that more Marvel Netflix characters could be making their way to the MCU movies, even Punisher.
There is no date yet on when We Own This City will be releasing, or who else besides Bernthal, Josh Charles and Jamie Hector will be starring in it, but more news is likely to be released in the coming months. In the meantime, our 2021 summer premiere schedule can help you plan ahead for what's in store.
