To promote the third season of Amazon Prime’s hugely popular show Reacher, the first three episodes of which come out Thursday, the streamer shared a scene with a simple message: They found a guy bigger than Jack Reacher! In the brief promo clip, we see Dutch bodybuilder and actor Olivier Richters, who’s 7-foot-2 and apparently a nightmare seatmate on commercial aircraft, playing the henchman Paulie, who makes Alan Ritchson, 6-foot-3 and yoked, look like some guy from your high school. This is a funny idea because, as we all know, Jack Reacher, who requests you call him only “Reacher,” is a mountain of a man, with hands like supermarket chickens or Thanksgiving turkeys or dinner plates. How will he defeat Paulie?
One thing about Reacher: He’ll find a way, and fans will happily watch him do it. In 2023, Season 2 of the big man’s eponymous action series was the most watched Amazon Prime show, and a fourth season was greenlit last fall, long before the third’s debut this week. Reacher also has a spinoff coming, featuring the character of Reacher ally Frances Neagley, as played by Maria Sten. The momentum has been there, but this latest season is when we’ll find out whether the many right-wingers on X who say they are boycotting the show will actually be able to slow down this juggernaut. (In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter last April, Ritchson, describing himself as a devout Christian, called Donald Trump a “rapist.” Earlier this week, he also blasted Republican politician Matt Gaetz, whom he called a “motherfucker.”)
While the show’s first season saw our hero, a wandering former military policeman, drifting into a small town, and the second developed his relationship with a group of veterans he had worked with while in the Army, the third—based on Lee Child’s book Persuader—has Reacher settling an old score. He joins a trio of Drug Enforcement Administration agents who are going rogue, trying to retrieve a confidential informant who has vanished after being planted inside a family business suspected of importing something other than rugs. Reacher suspects the involvement of a criminal who escaped him in the past after doing something awful to one of his protégés from his Army days, and he agrees to go undercover working security for this family at their isolated seacoast mansion in Maine, in order to find this old enemy. (And, of course, to murder him! That’s a given.)
The idea of Reacher, a huge man with famously negligible social skills, being an undercover agent makes for a good comic premise. There’s some family drama, as the patriarch, Zachary Beck (played by an unrecognizable and really good Anthony Michael Hall), and his college-age son Richard (Johnny Berchtold) try to mend their relationship, and Reacher finds himself acting as an impromptu counselor and boxing coach for the son. The setting, by the New England coast, offers a chance for us to see whether Reacher can swim or drive a snowplow. (He can do both.)
Reacher surrounds Ritchson with allies who serve as great foils for the show’s many comic moments—this time, it’s DEA agent Teresa Duffy, played by British actress Sonya Cassidy with a heavy Boston accent. (Duffy threatening death to a witness she’s interrogating illegally, who threatens to call his congressman: “The only congressman you’ll get to talk to is Teddy Fucking Kennedy.”) Duffy drags along her almost-retired friend Guillermo Villanueva (Roberto Montesinos), who’s been at a desk for years but steps up and administers beatdowns to henchmen as needed.
All of that might sound familiar to people who don’t already love Jack Reacher. What makes Reacher any better than other crime-fighting shows made in the streaming era? they may ask. Admittedly, there are some things about the show that make it feel very much like standard-issue content. There is an odd, unmarred blankness to every setting in the Reacherverse on Prime. The small town from Season 1 looks like a new mixed-use development that failed to attract homebuyers: The streets are too clean, and every house has perfect white trim. The second season ranged further into a diversity of places, but it still had that distinctive Toronto–cosplaying–New York feel to the streetscapes. The third season’s Maine mansion looks as if it was ordered from a catalog—no chips on the siding, every interior perfect.
Then there’s the fact that Alan Ritchson, a former model, is a couple of degrees too handsome to play Reacher, who is supposed to be a freak to look upon. In getting swole for the role, Ritchson became even hotter, and now he has far, far surpassed the book’s hero in his appeal to the eye. In motion, he holds his jacked arms away from his body, too muscle-bound to walk normally. In the promotional clip, Paulie, after finishing a rep of bench presses, asks Reacher how much he benches. Reacher replies, “Don’t know.” “Why not?” the giant asks. “ ’Cause it’s stupid,” Reacher responds. This is something the actual Reacher in Child’s books would say (how would he go to the gym, anyway, as a vagrant-by-choice with only a toothbrush to his name?), but it sounds preposterous coming out of the mouth of Ritchson—a guy who, I’m sorry, knows exactly what his bench PR is.
No, it shouldn’t work as well as it does, with this combination of the blank, quasi-A.I.-generated interiors and exteriors, and this Reacher who looks like an actor in his last few weeks of preparation for a Marvel movie. But Ritchson, who has been through some stuff, has a deeply creased brow and a quiet vibe of apartness, exuding a detached relationship to social convention that’s very Reacher. In this season’s Episode 3, in a conversation with Zachary Beck’s son Richard, who’s opening up about struggling to connect to a dad who he knows is not a good person, Reacher replies to Richard’s question—“Do you know what that’s like?”—with simple honesty: “No. My dad was a great guy.”
It’s not a very nice thing to say, but by the end of the season, Richard will realize that Reacher is, in fact, not an asshole about the things that matter. As lonely as he is, drifting through life punching and kicking people when he thinks it’s right, Reacher isn’t totally divorced from human connection. The series—and this season in particular—has a lot to say about how people recognize one another as fellow travelers, with codes of ethics that rhyme.
It’s that through line that makes Reacher ultimately more accessible to those who agree with Ritchson about Trump, rather than those who would prefer he shut up and just get to punching people with his dinner-plate hands. Reacher has always been, as readers of the books know, a person who holds many standard liberal points of view, including a basic belief in the defense of the little guy—it’s just that he enforces this with fists and guns. Is that a contradiction in terms? Welcome to the Reacherverse.