Make Reacher Your Holiday Binge

Brooke Palmer

Now more than ever, at the dawn of the post-Peak TV era, it’s best to approach television like the food pyramid. The divisions may vary—who am I to tell you how to use your junk-food slot?—but no balanced diet is complete without a little Dad Content, regardless of whether you’re actually a male with offspring or not. Dad Content takes many forms, but at its core, regardless of medium, think of what basic cable used to signify: No-frills action, maybe a legal drama, dudes rocking and/or seeking vengeance. Bonus points if it’s a biopic, or at least comes with some kind of historical antecedent.

My colleague Vince Mancini has already written about the year in Dad Cinema, but on the small screen, Prime has sunk a buzzer-beater by releasing a new season of the one and only Reacher just in time for the holidays. That’s Jack Reacher, a six-foot-five, 220-pound glorified hobo who drifts around the continental U.S. minding his business, following whims until drama inevitably finds him. Jack is an honorably-discharged, highly-decorated major in the US Army, and a former military police chief who used law, order and super sleuthing to keep the country’s roughest group of men in check. Which is to say, he has a particular set of skills, the kind that draw him into problems even when he’s doing his best to stay away.

Reacher is perhaps the quintessential Dad hero: an absolute brute who is also a deductive genius but only uses his superpowers of brains and brawn when trouble is literally shoved in his face. Season 2, which launched with a three-episode premiere last Friday, is already off to a roaring start, full of the kind of action best viewed in peak Dad pose (standing in front of the TV, just left of center, ever-so fixated.)

Season 2 finds Jack in New York City, this time reunited with his old 110th MP squad, out to avenge the death of their de facto little brother. Season 1, you may recall, found Jack in a small Georgia town, out to avenge the death of his older brother; this is the kind of potboiler basic-ness you want from Dad Content. Reacher is the kind of series where the heroes solemnly rhapsodize about their fallen comrade’s sense of honor and duty to his toddler son, who can’t even comprehend the concept of death yet, where a straight-laced cop warns the 110th not to go vigilante by telling them, “No more cowboy shit,” only for Jack to stare dead into the camera and instruct his team to “Saddle up” as soon as the detective leaves. Good Dad Content understands that stuff like this is kind of corny, but leans into it with self-awareness instead of running towards faux prestige. And we love it for that.

Reacher’s Dad bonafides are doubled by the fact that these stories are literally the stuff of airport paperbacks: The TV show is adapted from mystery writer Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, of which there are 26, dating back to 1997’s Killing Floor. That book inspired Reacher’s maiden season; it wasn’t quite a Boys-level hit, but the fanfare was enough to keep the momentum going, as it was for Amazon’s John Krasinski-fronted Jack Ryan series.

Adapting Tom Clancy’s spy hero for the post-9/11 era is one thing; bringing Reacher to the screen is (pun halfway intended) a taller order. He’s a Hulk-sized Captain America who needs to be believable as both a drifter and one of the sharpest sleuths in mystery-novel history. On the page, he has an extremely dry wit, but he isn’t a wisecracker either. He has to be magnetic enough to charm women and damsels, non-threatening enough to seem like the kind of person an average-sized citizen would plausibly ask for help, and lowkey enough to believably inhabit his aimless lifestyle. I know all of this because at press time, I’ve read a handful of Reacher’s prose adventures—11, to be exact, right through Bad Luck and Trouble, the story currently being adapted for season 2. (Once again, giving in to the pleasures of Dad Content in all mediums comes for us all, sooner or later.)

He’s a tough, precise character to crack, so much so that I’m now forced to break form and critique my Hollywood president, Tom Cruise—even he couldn’t really nail it. A little over ten years ago, Cruise took the first swing at bringing Jack Reacher to the screen—the big screen, of course, because Tom Cruise—by adapting One Shot, the ninth in the Reacher series; a 2016 sequel did the same with Never Go Back, the eighteenth Reacher book, which I have not gotten to just yet. Both are perfectly fine, and ultimately forgettable films, forever lost to midday TNT syndication. For one thing, there isn’t enough movie magic in the industry to imbue Cruise with Jack Reacher’s physicality as written—and the physicality is kind of the point. And his take on Jack leans too left into no-frills drifter mode, rendering him a little stiff and robotic.

But most of all, Reacher adventures are twisty, deceptively simple mysteries, often quite casually dark and bleakly violent. The Prime series is a perfect compromise in every way. Star Alan Ritchson doesn’t just look the part—for all intents and purposes, visually, he is Reacher. Ritchson is a charismatic enough performer (he gave the Fast franchise a much-needed shot of new life recently in Fast X); as written and performed in the TV show, his Jack is a bit more smug and post-MCU witty, but that feels like an inevitable concession.

Also inevitable: padding the story enough to mete out over eight episodes. One of Child’s strengths is his story structure; the Reacher books feature knotty conspiracies that are untangled at a lean pace. A 100-minute film is a bit too short, but eight 45-minute episodes threaten to add unnecessary fluff. It’s hard to remember to care about this though, when you’re watching Jack and his brain trust decode clues in concert before embarking on a sequence as kickass as the bad-guy siege that powers episode three.

Still, fun as this season is shaping up to be, I’m a little lost as to why showrunner Nick Santora decided to hop around in Reacher chronology this early in the show’s run, passing over Die Trying, the second book, which if I’m remembering it correctly is about Reacher accidentally getting swept up in some kind of militia plot to overthrow the government. It certainly is not lacking for TV-ready action. Bad Luck and Trouble might have seemed more conventionally adaptable, but the beauty of Child’s book series is that he can drop Jack Reacher anywhere and it makes sense: at a remote family-run ranch in Texas where nefarious goings-on are afoot; on the Upper West Side, mediating a wealthy kidnapping plot; or with the FBI, unraveling a case that’s more Kiss the Girls than crime caper.

Dad Content rarely tries to do too much, favoring status quo above big swings, but there’s a variety pack-feel to Reacher’s misadventures in the books that the series would be wise to embrace. There’s no reason a proposed fifth season of this show shouldn’t draw from Echo Burning and plop Ritchson down at that ranch in Texas. It would have slightly different rhythms, but the broad appeal—watching Ritchson out-smart and then manhandle sinister authority figures who have him fucked up—would be the same. (If there’s a book I’m personally invested in seeing adapted, it’s Persuader, a Reacher undercover story that’s probably the most intense out of all that I’ve read so far, a high bar to clear.)

These are nitpicks, though. For now, Reacher is doing everything right — and hopefully laying the groundwork for a series that can run counter to all the rich fatty prestige TV proteins for years to come. Season 2 couldn’t have come at a better time, as we’re all about to log out and off. Pour up some eggnog, kick your feet up and tap in.

Originally Appeared on GQ