Why Reacher Is the Best Thing Streaming Right Now

Amazon Reacher succeeds because it understands exactly what it is: a show about an impossibly large man who arrives in small towns, solves crimes, and beats people up. Alan Ritchson Jack Reacher is six-foot-three, 235 pounds of principle and violence.

Ritchson casting corrected the central problem of the 2012 Tom Cruise film: Reacher is supposed to be enormous. His size is a plot point. Ritchson fills doorframes, and the show frames him accordingly.

The fight choreography is the show selling point. Reacher fights are brutal, efficient, and grounded in plausible martial arts. He hits people very hard, and they stay down.

Each season maps to one novel, and not in order. Season one adapts Killing Floor, the 1997 debut set in the invented town of Margrave, Georgia. Season two takes Bad Luck and Trouble, the eleventh book. Season three takes Persuader, the seventh. The novels are almost all standalone, so the show can raid the backlist in whatever order suits it, and so can you.

Each season adapts a single Reacher novel, giving the show a self-contained structure. The mysteries are twisty enough to keep you guessing but not so convoluted that you lose track.

Lee Child is Jim Grant, who spent eighteen years at Granada Television in Manchester and wrote Killing Floor after being made redundant in 1995. His brother, writing as Andrew Child, has since taken over the series. The formula was reverse-engineered from what sells, which is why the books are so efficient and why they adapt to television with so little friction.

The fights are staged short. Most last under twenty seconds and end on a single decisive strike, which is closer to how violence actually works than the extended exchanges most shows favour. Season one was shot in Ontario standing in for small-town Georgia, and the flat autumn light does a lot to sell a man passing through somewhere he will never come back to.

The show has a sense of humor about itself that prevents it from becoming self-serious. Reacher deadpan delivery and complete indifference to social norms create natural comedy.

In the books Reacher is six foot five and somewhere north of 220 pounds, and half the plots turn on people either underestimating him or declining to fight him. Tom Cruise is five foot seven. The 2012 film adapted One Shot, the ninth novel, and it is a decent thriller that simply is not Reacher.

Maria Sten plays Frances Neagley, the one person Reacher treats as an equal, and she is getting her own Prime series. If the show sends you to the books, do not start at the beginning out of duty. Killing Floor is good, but Persuader and Bad Luck and Trouble are better written, and the paperbacks run about eight pounds each. There are close to thirty of them.

Stream on Prime Video at https://www.primevideo.com/detail/reacher. With Lee Child extensive backlist, the show has material for years of seasons.

Reacher is essential if you want a show that delivers exactly what it promises: a big man solving problems with his brain and his fists in equal measure. It is comfort food for action fans, executed with skill and self-awareness.