Reacher season 4 arrives shortly
Courtesy of Amazon
I don’t know how Reacher does it. There is something about this show that has exceptionally broad appeal, both the viewers that make it one of the most-viewed Amazon series of the year, every year, and critics who have given it sky-high review scores for four seasons now. Ahead of tomorrow’s Reacher season 4 premiere, that has not changed, according to critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
As it stands, Reacher season 4 has a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score from critics. No, not all that many are in yet, but this is not any kind of outlier. Season 3 had a 98%, season 2 had a 98% and season 1 had a 92%, and now the show has a 97% average across three seasons. Wild.
Reacher is structured where it can pull from any one of Lee Child’s novels in any order, given that almost all of them are structured as standalone tales. You need to know that Reacher is a big guy who is former Military Police and has an addictive sense of justice. That’s pretty much it.
Season 4 of Reacher is adapting the Lee Child book Gone Tomorrow, where Reacher believes he’s found a suicide bomber on a subway train, but only a single woman ends up dead as the situation then evolves into a mystery that needs to be solved. This time, Reacher is being pursued by rogue government agents rather than run-of-the-mill criminals. His almost mandatory female co-star for this season is Tamara Green, played by Sydelle Noel. I remember her from the killed-too-soon GLOW on Netflix.
Reacher is a clockwork hit for Amazon, getting four seasons out in just over four years. Its biggest issue may end up being keeping star Alan Ritchson around and on schedule, given that he is increasingly busy elsewhere as an action star. Most recently, he starred in the Netflix sci-fi hit War Machine and he has been very clear that he has been in talks with James Gunn about showing up as a superhero (or villain) in the DCU somewhere (not Batman, he confirms). That said, a Reacher paycheck indefinitely is certainly a motivator.
The good thing about Reacher is that it can remain a robust series indefinitely with simply so much source material to draw on. Child has written 30 Reacher books, starting in 1997 with The Killing Floor. Most shows may adapt a novel or a trilogy, but there are so many blueprints here, if Amazon wanted to, it could keep making the series for decades. Alan Ritchson is 43 now, but with action stars mantaining relevancey at almsot any age now (Liam Neeson, age 74, practically makes an action movie a year), that may not be an issue. One of the things that Reacher gets right, and really the main reason it works at all, is Ritchson as a pitch-perfect version of the character, something the more diminuitive Tom Cruise didn’t embody durring his middling-to-poorly revieved Jack Reacher movies more than 10 years ago. But the revival of the brand wasn’t hurt by that initial attempt at all, clearly.
Turning back to the show, I just don’t know if I can side with my fellow critics on at least the past few seasons. Not season 4 specifically, as I haven’t seen it yet, but Reacher as a 97% overall? The last two seasons being a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes? The first one was the best, and there were some pretty glaring issues with the next two. I find myself more in line with the audience scores here, where for seasons 2 and 3 they were both below an 80%. It’s a solid action show to be sure, but this high of scores compared to series that normally put up those numbers is kind of crazy, if you ask me.
Reacher season 4 may not stay at 100%, but there’s no indication it will go too much lower, if past seasons are any indication. We’ll see how it goes starting tomorrow.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
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