Despite his literary hero previously getting the Tom Cruise treatment on the big screen, Jack Reacher author Lee Child is most impressed with the books’ Prime Video series adaptation.
As Reacher heads into its fourth season with Alan Ritchson as the titular ex-military police officer, the creator of the character praised the “relentless non-stop pace” and binge-worthy streaming format of the show, which was developed by Nick Santora.
“That was the huge attraction, doing the long-form narrative that season-long TV gives you,” Child explained to the ShortList. “In the books, Reacher is fleshed out, he is a fully rounded character as much as he can be. With light and shade and loud and quiet. In the books, that’s obvious, but of course for a short-format adaptation that gets compressed and misses a lot, but we had the time to show it all and that was one of the things that I was most excited about and also makes it all the more effective.”
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Premiering in 2022, the first season of Reacher was based on Child’s 1997 debut novel Killing Floor, with the subsequent seasons pulled from Bad Luck and Trouble (2007) and Persuader (2003). Currently in production, Season 4 is based on Gone Tomorrow (2009).
Child continued, “My theory is that if you have relentless non-stop pace that’s the same thing as having no pace at all. What you need is to show the differences, the quiet parts make the action parts even more effective. And so that was the thrill and the fun of doing a whole season on one story.
“I think it is addictive for a novelist,” he said. “I can guarantee that if streaming television had been around before, no novelist would ever have chosen anything else, because this works so much better.”
Before Ritchson took over the role, Tom Cruise starred in the movies Jack Reacher (2012) and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016).