I put the first episode of Reacher yesterday not expecting much and I ended up bingeing the whole season in one seating. Prefacing this by saying that I’m among the rare few who, despite reading the series, were not put out by Tom Cruise’s performance in the movie adaptations (or even the choice of having him in the first place), the 2022 show is pretty solid and I will agree that it is more faithful to how the book depicted the character. Alan Ritchson’s Reacher is not just greatly layered, he’s also great at showing these layers gradually, playing on the other characters’ expectations (and in some way also those of the ones among the audience who don’t know the books). Reacher is an enigma when you first meet him, but the core elements of his character are never in doubt, and the first episodes establishes that perfectly by having him say absolutely nothing in the first ten minutes or so, yet show both where his moral compass points to and how skilled he is at what he does. And while he is a nigh-unstoppable powerhouse with Holmesian-level deductive skills, he’s also sufficiently reliant on others during the course of the series that he doesn’t quite become the Gary Sue one could mistake him to be at first glance.
The supporting cast also does a bang up job, Willa Fitzgerald as the tough-as-nails Roscoe and Malcolm Goodwin as the uptight by-the-book Finlay, alongside veteran actors like Currie Graham and Bruce McGill for the antagonists. The setting brilliantly reeks of “small town with a dark secret” from the very beginning (a staple of the book series) and the whole fun is to entangle what that secret is, and the twists make it very worthwhile at the same time as they make it very, very personal for Reacher, something the baddies painfully discover is definitely something you never want to face.
All in all, this adaptation is a very pleasant surprise, moreso than Jack Ryan, also on Prime and for which I had similarly subverted expectations. The 8-episode format allows writers and actors the time and space to really explore and develop the characters in a way that feels natural and organic, establish the backstories, introduce foes, allies and folks in between without rushing through the motions, play with the uncertainty of knowing who’s with or against our protagonist…
With a whole book series to choose from, if they can keep up that level of care for the source material, I’ll be looking forward to future seasons.