Reacher Season 1: Time to Reach for the Off Button?

**Mild Spoilers for Season 1 of Reacher**

Reacher is Amazon’s new, eight episode action, suspense/mystery show based off of the first novel in the Jack Reacher book series. While it starts out pretty okay in the first few episodes, particularly because of its entertaining titular hero, the show quickly becomes very, very ludicrous.

Reacher is still sometimes fun to watch, but it is definitely not a “good” show, and it’s not quite up to the level of even being a guilty pleasure show either. One thing that becomes clear while watching it is that there are some clear tropes of the Reacher universe that repeat in most of the season’s eight episodes. Let’s take a look at some of the things that you can expect to find in any episode of Reacher, which also happen to be some of the reasons Reacher doesn’t cut it.

There Will Be Murder—Lots of Murder

The murder rate in Margrave, Georgia, where most of our story is set, is off the charts. Margrave is a fictional town, but if it were a real place it would be, without a doubt, the most dangerous place in the world. You are ridiculously likely to be brutally murdered in Margrave. Maybe in the history of the town it was a safe, picturesque place to live, but for the week or so that Reacher is in the area you better watch out because there’s a new forecast and that forecast is murder.

Pictured: Reacher and friends discuss murders.

There is so much death on this show and it extends to anywhere Reacher goes and almost anyone he interacts with. We’re also told about other things that have happened in other places around the world where people have been killed. It doesn’t matter if you are a police officer or a lady delivering Reacher papers or one of the nearly endless amount of foreign goons who go after Reacher, if you are a character in the Reacher universe you are probably going to be killed.

An Unbalanced Universe

I don’t have a problem with a TV show creating a world where characters are killed left and right and government agencies like the police or FBI just don’t get involved in the story at all. I also don’t mind a story where a murder does trigger a big police response. Reacher wants to be both of these things.

The police and different governmental agents are a big part of our story—they are definitely involved. Sometimes when characters are murdered, the following day their homes are surrounded by police cars and officers everywhere. Other times though, when random goons are killed in the woods or when Reacher takes out a bunch of guys at a house, the police are nowhere to be found. No larger government agencies send anyone to town despite how many bodies are piling up.

Even the major catalyst for Reacher’s strong drive to figure out what’s going on—the death of his brother, a high ranking government agent, should realistically have resulted in loads of attention from the federal government. But it doesn’t presumably because of corruption in Margrave getting in the way. I feel like the writers just decided that almost any inconsistencies or plot holes could just be explained away by having the entire Reacher universe be filled with incredibly corrupt characters when convenient.

Reacher does not need to be realistic (and it’s obviously not), but it needs to be consistent with the rules of its universe. Throughout the show you’ll find that it’s often not.

A Lack of Deep Characters 

A show like Reacher does not need to have in-depth characters, but there is absolutely no depth to any character throughout the entire show. I think the creators mistook the idea of giving characters quirks or just little, super basic bits of their histories to be what makes for good characters without adding any real depth.

For example, Detective Finlay, one of the few non-corrupt residents of Margrave, wears tweed and does not like when people curse. Roscoe Conklin, the female love-interest cop, has had family live in the town for a long time. Also her name is Roscoe even though she’s a woman. That’s quirky!

We’ve also got an evil (but cunning) businessman, a black barber, and a sheriff who walks with a silly cane and is so clearly crooked that anyone who came to Margrave and met him would be expected to immediately ask, “Why do you have an evil sheriff?”

References to Reacher’s Size

Reacher is supposed to be 6’5 and the character references this is his height a couple of times throughout the series. The actual height of actor Alan Ritchson who portrays him is 6’2. He’s a fit guy, pretty big. If you drop by an average gym around a busy time though you’re definitely going to see people bigger and more physically imposing than him. Basically, the man playing our lead is a fit-looking, larger than average human, but he’s not Lou Ferrigno in The Incredible Hulk. He’s not Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies.

Still, the writers clearly made it a point that Reacher’s massive size must be referenced constantly by other characters. He is a “sasquatch.” A “beast.” So big other characters question how he can fit in the car. This is referenced not just once an episode, but at least four of five times an episode by multiple characters. People in the real world do not feel the need to comment/make jokes about people’s physical appearances even remotely as often as the constant barrage of comments Reacher gets.

This is fine at first, or maybe it’d be fine for one remark an episode, but after a while, done so frequently, it just becomes totally absurd. People react to Reacher’s size the way I would expect people to react to the size of an extremely, extremely small percentage of people on the entire planet. Basically Reacher is treated as if he’s as big as Shaquille O’Neal. Reacher’s no Shaq.

The man who should’ve been cast as Reacher?

Flashbacks That Tell Us Nothing

Flashbacks need to tell us something important—they’re a break from the main story so they’d better either inform us as to something that pertains in some way to the main story or something about why a character is the way that he or she is.

In Reacher, we get flashbacks that exist simply for the sake of having flashbacks. These flashbacks tell us nothing about why Reacher is the man he is today. In fact, Reacher behaves in these flashbacks exactly how he’d behave if put in the same situation today. He beats up a bully. He is headstrong. He is the exact same character. We get no sense that he has grown or changed in any way since he was a child. These flashbacks should not have been included as they don’t add to our story.

These flashbacks also are also triggered in a sometimes laughable way. Reacher will see a random, everyday object and will suddenly think back to a specific time in his youth that began in some arbitrary way with that object being involved.

For example, he sees a bike on the sidewalk and thinks back to an instance in which he and his brother rode up to a location on a bike and witnessed bullying. The entire bulk of the scene takes place after they arrive on the bike, the bike has nothing at all to do with the real substance of the memory, but it is the bike that’s somehow triggering.

Another time he sees some barbicide blue disinfectant solution at the barbers and is brought back to a memory that just randomly starts when he was getting a haircut. This is all pretty ridiculous and it got to the point that after Reacher killed a man in a pool I was surprised we didn’t get a flashback that began at a time when young Reacher was once in a pool.

One other thing about the flashbacks that stands out is that Reacher’s parents call him “Reacher,” which is also their last name. Reacher’s mother will also say things to him like he has the “strength of three boys his age,” where the dialogue just feels really inserted into the scene and odd, especially considering that young Reacher is played by a normal-looking, skinny kid. It’s all just very bizarre.

So should you watch Reacher?

Well, one of the positives of the show is that it’s not as serious or somber-feeling as a lot of shows created in recent years. It’s not at all a “feel-good” show, but it’s not heavy television. It can sometimes be enjoyable to poke fun at some of the ridiculousness of the show too, but I’m not sure how much a positive that really should be considered.

After the first two episodes, I would’ve recommended Reacher, but I wouldn’t recommend it after viewing a full season of the show. If you want a show like Reacher with a cool lead protagonist, I’d recommend Justified, starring Timothy Olyphant, which aired for six seasons before wrapping up in 2015. It’s a much better written, and all-around superior show. As far as Reacher is concerned, your time is probably better spent elsewhere—just don’t spend that time in Margrave because you’d most likely be murdered.

Reacher Season 1 Grade: 4/10