Amazon's Reacher is an unfussy, slightly dopey salve in a sea of television trying to feign the bombast, awe and import of cinema

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"Sometimes all you want is a tight, little potboiler where an erudite caveman breaks people in two, says Brandon Streussnig of the Amazon TV series adaptation of Lee Child's novel series, created by Nick Santora. "Maybe it gets a little sensual, maybe someone fires off a faux philosophic crackerjack one-liner. Amazon’s Reacher fills that void. It’s a show stuck in time. A time when your father might kick back on the couch on a Saturday afternoon, have a beer or two, and fall asleep to the soothing sounds of fists hitting flesh. We all eventually become our parents and, if nothing else, Reacher is the perfect show to begin that process." Streussnig adds that Alan Ritchson is "a bit of a mind-melting screen presence. Blonde hair, square jaw, muscles on top of muscles, there isn’t an inch of him that isn’t perfect. So perfect, it often dips into an uncanny valley because he looks like he’s a creation built from mocap. Frighteningly, this is the real deal and that’s exactly what helps him erase (Tom) Cruise from your mind. Ritchson, admittedly, isn’t setting the world on fire in the acting department, but he’s got an eminently watchable cold, steely intensity broken only by undeniable charm. Always six steps ahead of everyone around him, he’s a meathead Sherlock Holmes. The smartest guy in the room and when the dust settles, the only guy left standing too. While entertaining, seeing Cruise outsmart people isn’t something you’ve never seen before. Seeing a guy with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body do it? That’s worth its considerable weight in gold. Ritchson tromping through the town hulking over friend and foe alike, having each of them figured out before they can say a word, brings Reacher a charm that’s often missed from seedy gumshoe tales. It’s a charm that washes over the entire show. Reacher has no illusions of what it is or isn’t. Where too many detective sagas on the small screen often devolve into joyless, “what’s it all about” meandering, Reacher is bruising, pulpy fun. What keeps you locked in straight through to the finale is its willingness to get down into the muck and shrug its shoulders when asked to examine it."

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• Reacher captures Jack Reacher's size, but not his potential: "Tonally, there was a real opportunity to elevate the genre here, particularly with Jack," says Tim Surette. "There are moments when things are lighthearted and Ritchson deadpans a line for laughs, fully winking at the fact that Reacher is a bit of a robotic killing, crime-solving machine. And the show knows this at times, too. 'You're a good man,' an earnest Roscoe says to him after he whisks her to safety and explains his checkered past in a middle-of-the-season episode. 'If anyone comes through that door, shoot them,' he replies. It's back to the sense of male fantasy; Reacher's all business, and that clashes with those he works with, creating humor and character for the show.  But most of Reacher is a standard page-to-script adaptation of a dad's bedside table book, with only a nominally interesting mystery of corruption and greed taking up more space than it should. Ironically, Reacher is more fascinating when Reacher is scarfing down a plate of BBQ like a grizzly bear in a competitive eating competition or teasing Finlay, who is Black, about his lack of blues music knowledge and affinity for the classic rock band Kansas than he is while on the hunt for vast conspiracies with clues in blood trails. But Reacher doesn't commit to that fun side of the character as much as it could. It's safely played to capture fans of Amazon's other popular Jack, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, and it should do the trick, but Reacher, which is a perfectly fine dad show but not a must-see, doesn't have aspirations to go much further beyond that."
• Creator Nick Santora’s gives every indication of understanding the things that make Jack Reacher distinctive and entertaining as a character: "Somewhat predictably, Santora’s hopelessly devoted approach to medium-jumping presents its own issues, underlining instead of correcting flaws from a franchise I adore even as I understand its myriad imperfections," says Daniel Fienberg. "Jack Reacher describes himself as a hobo, but he’s much more of a ronin. He travels the country, by foot and by public transportation, based solely on whims and when he arrives in a town, you can guarantee that he’s going to stumble into a mid-level conspiracy. He’s perfectly tailored for television since Jack Reacher is basically a no-transformation-required combo of Bruce Banner/Hulk from The Incredible Hulk." Fienberg adds: "Santora and his writing team have captured many of Reacher’s eccentricities, from his no-frills approach to packing — a passport, small wad of cash and travel toothbrush — to his obsessive accumulation of roadside trivia to this gigantic man-of-few-words’ love of quippy rejoinders. The season balances Reacher’s brutal physicality — I don’t love anything as much as Jack Reacher loves using his forehead to break somebody’s nose — and his Holmesian deductive reasoning. It’s mostly a strict adaptation of Killing Floor — one of Reacher’s later recurring allies is added for fun — and I never doubted the creative team’s affection for the source material for a second. But Child’s books are compulsively readable page-turners, not unimpeachable literature, and their flaws may be harder to ignore in this format."
• Reacher delivers the big man and the big fun the Tom Cruise movies lacked: "Reacher the TV series doesn’t have the star power of the films that preceded it, but in many ways, it has the potential to be even more successful," says Terry Terones. "By providing a deeper look into a complex character, Reacher could do for Jack Reacher what Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan did for its titular character in another Amazon series: take an existing franchise beloved by many in a fun new direction."
• The fun of Reacher is to see a Schwarzenegger-grade action presence use their head so much: "If this first season is any indication, Reacher is bound to have as supportive a home on Amazon as with the incredibly popular Jack Ryan," says Nick Allen. "The character seems to fit better here, with the benefit of Ritchson's own multi-tiered charisma, which only starts with how he looks and sounds like an inflated Paul Rudd. Like Reacher, Ritchson also feels strikingly new to the area, but you can’t stop noticing him. It doesn't get old to watch his brain compute, and see his fists respond."
• Jack Reacher isn't the kind of character that could carry his own TV series: "The difference between Reacher and Amazon’s other dad-fic dramas is that the longer it runs, the more obvious its protagonist-shaped void becomes," says Joshua Alston. "That’s not a criticism of Ritchson, whose casting borders on the miraculous. Ritchson’s physique cuts the right figure, and he has the charm needed to split the difference between Child’s brutal Reacher and Cruise’s version, which replaced the conspicuous brawn with stealth and guile. Ritchson excels during the terrific fight sequences but keeps the demeanor of a man who fights his way out of jams because he wants to, not because he can’t talk his way out. The deficiency is Reacher himself, a character beloved for qualities that leave him ill-equipped to anchor a serialized drama. Reacher lives austerely, traveling with little more than a toothbrush and occasionally stopping to buy secondhand T-shirts when the previous one gets drenched in henchman blood. He’s most known for his brutal, Krav Maga-inspired fighting style, which is well-represented here in sequences where he rips through groups of generic toughs and seems barely inconvenienced. As he clips through the mystery, he’s never wrong about a single conclusion. And forget about moral quandaries, as Reacher’s compass is always stuck at true north. Ultimately, Reacher simply isn’t a character designed to carry a dynamic throughline over eight episodes, especially without voiceover dialogue." 
• Amazon’s take on Reacher is as solidly made as he is and delivers the rollicking yarn as efficiently as the man himself can dispatch a Glock-wielding gangster: "It is great, great fun and will come as a great, great relief to the Reacher devotees who will surely – at least at first – form the bulk of viewers," says Lucy Mangan. "It will please them endlessly but is still drawn broadly enough as a crime drama to attract others. Pour yourself a black coffee, sit back and enjoy."
• Reacher is a solid adaptation, perfectly suited to bingeing on a snow day or stormy winter’s night: "It’s as if it was designed to fill the role previously played by Bosch on the Prime Video roster: enjoyable comfort viewing based on a long-running book series, plenty of action, nothing too taxing on the ol’ brain cells," says Scott Van Doviak. "Season one is a straightforward adaptation of the book that kicked off the Reacher series, Killing Floor. It doesn’t take long for the first episode to establish the character and his world: Jack Reacher (no one calls him by his first name, not even his mother) is a former special investigator for the Army’s Military Police, now a drifter who roams the country carrying nothing but a toothbrush. He loves the blues, and the opening of Reacher finds him stepping off a bus in Margrave, Georgia, just because he heard bluesman Blind Blake may have been murdered there."
• Almost every aspect of Reacher feels designed to please longtime readers of the books: "Where in the Star Wars or Marvel universes fan service takes the form of easter eggs, Reacher fan service is a bit more brutal: He snaps wrists, cracks legs, and busts skulls," says Dan Jackson. "But the character, a retired US Army police officer who now wanders the country solving elaborate mysteries in small towns, is more than a blunt object. Reacher appreciates the blues, loves a slice of pie and a black coffee, and enjoys traveling on the bus. Reacher's transient nature lends itself to episodic storytelling. Like Amazon's Bosch, still the peak of recent airport novel adaptations, Reacher (the show) draws plot elements from Reacher (the books) and stretches them across a full season, allowing Reacher (the character) to slowly pull together the strands of a conspiracy...The plot is needlessly complicated, packed with gruesome deaths and ponderous flashbacks, but that comes with the territory. The what and the why of the larger narrative don't really matter as much as the small details of how Reacher goes about solving the mystery."
• Lee Child was impressed with Alan Ritchson, who has been described as "a 6-foot-3 actor with biceps the size of Serrano hams": “Before I was a writer, I worked nearly 20 years in television, so I know what goes on,” the author told The New York Times of monitoring the production. “How often does that happen?” he added. “Almost never. And that was down to Alan principally — not to make him too bigheaded.” As for Ritchson, 39, he was downright starry-eyed. And intimidated — not usual for a man his size. “Meeting Lee was one of the most nerve-racking experiences of my life,” he said in a joint call with Child. “He’s lived with this character for 25 years. Am I going to be enough?” Ritchson was given a list of do's and don'ts, including that Jack Reacher drinks black coffee and would never treat a woman as a second-class citizen because she might be smaller than he is --  the truth is, everyone’s smaller than he is. “I want to be as authentic as possible,” said Ritchson, “and I don’t want to be ridiculed by the many die-hard fans who are going to remember that detail from the book and think that we got it wrong.”
• Ritchson read all 24 Jack Reacher books during the long audition process: "I hadn't read the books, but the audition process was very competitive and took over a year, so I got involved with the books as that process was unfolding," he said. "They wanted very much to find the right guy, to make sure that the fans were happy." He added: "It was a long process. As I started to get closer to the end, I started reading the books, and I'm glad I did, because I had a whole different understanding of who this guy was and why this is such an international hit. I read all 24 books before filming, and the first one twice, so by the time we were filming, I was such a huge fan. I was so in love with Reacher. I just was like, I have to get this right. I see why everybody loves this so much."
• Ritchson recalls needing surgery after an on-set injury: “I had to eat a lot of pizza to bulk up for this role… I started working out a little more and stepping into that famous Reacher silhouette. And then the fight training was another level,” said Ritchson. “Reacher’s a heavy yoke to wear, he left me a little wounded. I broke a joint, my AC joint in the shoulder. I had surgery when we wrapped… (And) I tore an oblique in a fight on set. It was rough, but I got through it and I feel better than ever now. Hopefully, we can do many more. I’ll put those scars behind me.”