All 4 Seasons Of Reacher, Ranked

The Prime Video series “Reacher” may be a massive ratings success — so much so that it was greenlit for Season 5 before Season 4 even premiered — but not every season is created equal. Some thrilled viewers, whether they’d read the books or not; others disappointed pretty much everyone.

The good news is that “Reacher” can survive the occasional disappointing outing. The show is basically an anthology series where nothing is permanent except its lead character, which means that, if you don’t like how one season’s going, you can always check back in for the next one. At this point, that’s what some of the book readers have been doing for decades. 

Here are the four “Reacher” seasons ranked by how consistently fun, engaging, and suspenseful they were. And while much of this is down to the efforts of the creators working behind the scenes, it’s worth remembering that some of these entries had the good fortune of adapting Lee Child’s best novels — while others were stuck adapting his worst. 

The big problem with “Reacher” Season 2 is that it has too many Reachers. The appeal of the show is that nobody else is close to Jack Reacher’s (Alan Ritchson) level, so viewers get to watch more ordinary characters react to this absurdly impressive man. But Reacher spends Season 2 surrounded by his old army buddies, all of whom function as mini-Reachers in their own right. 

The result is that there are no stakes. These guys handle nearly every single obstacle with ease, and there’s zero doubt that everything will work out exactly as Reacher says it will. This is a problem in the book “Bad Luck and Trouble,” too, as was the annoying “do not mess with the special investigators” catchphrase. The fight scenes also lack edge here, which Alan Ritchson himself pointed out in an interview with The Movie Podcast. “Season 2, I wasn’t really thrilled with a lot of the action at all,” he said. “I was really upset with the way some of those fights were executed. We didn’t do a good job on the day. We weren’t using the right tools. It wasn’t cut very well.”

What’s worse than the lack of stakes is how boring the characters are: They have no flaws, and their worldview is never challenged in any meaningful way. Season 2 does briefly threaten to do something interesting by raising the idea that Reacher’s faith in one of his army buddies might be misplaced — only to again confirm that he was actually right all along. 

Probably the biggest disappointment in Season 4 of “Reacher” is that its opening sequence pales in comparison to the way it goes down in “Gone Tomorrow.” As Reacher sizes up a potential suicide bomber on the subway, the show’s inability to take viewers into his mind makes the scene feel short, perfunctory, and barely suspenseful. There are ways to capture the book’s tone — the show could have taken Reacher’s later explanation to the cops and used it as voiceover, for instance — but Season 4 seems uninterested in doing anything that interesting.

Still, Season 4 is pretty fun. The twist around Agnez Mo’s character, Lila Hoth, made for a fun change of pace, playing around with audience expectations after the first three seasons gave Reacher relatively straightforward romances. Season 4 also deserves praise for being the first since Season 1 to stand entirely on its own; the writers declined to shoehorn in a character from a previous season for the sake of cheap fan service. Overall, Season 4 fully embraces the series’ anthology format, and it’s all the better for it. 

While the political thriller storyline that drives the season is consistently exciting, another mark against Season 4 is that Reacher’s two main teammates, Tamara Green (Sydelle Noel) and Jacob Merrick (Chris Marquette), aren’t quite as engaging as Reacher’s previous allies. For Merrick especially, the season spends way too much time on him spelling out his grief in drawn-out monologues, even though the quieter moments of Marquette’s performance already get that across. 

Season 3 introduces a simple but thrilling concept to the series: What if Jack Reacher met someone who could actually take him in a fight? Seemingly as a response to the lackluster fight sequences of Season 2, the third season introduces the terrifying Paul “Paulie” Van Hoven (Olivier Richters), who brings some much-needed uncertainty — and a few brutal brawls — into the series. 

The other refreshing part of Season 3 is how intimate the setting feels. There won’t be some big terrorist attack if Reacher fails here; if things go wrong, the small family Reacher is protecting will die. Unlike the Season 4 finale, in which the villains are planning to unleash a terrorist attack on Philadelphia, the deaths of characters like Richard Beck (Johnny Berchtold) feel like a plausible outcome that the audience actually needs to worry about. 

The only real flaw of Season 3 is that Reacher’s two new police partners, Susan (Sonya Cassidy) and Guillermo (Roberto Montesinos), are far from the best characters Reacher has had to team up with. With that in mind …

The major appeal of “Reacher” Season 1 is that Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) and Roscoe (Willa Fitzgerald) are so compelling. Alongside Reacher himself, they make for the best core trio of any season yet, and the writers seemed to know it; they even brought Finlay back for one episode in Season 2, even though no such scene occurred in the books. Fans are still hoping Roscoe might make her own return, too, book canon be damned. 

Granted, part of why Finlay and Roscoe work so well is that this is the show’s first time using their archetypes. There are echoes of Roscoe in Season 2’s Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan), as well as in Susan and Tamara. Would Roscoe have been as beloved if the show had adapted some other book first? Maybe not to the same extent, but it’s certainly possible. Either way, Roscoe’s chemistry with Reacher — and Finlay’s platonic chemistry with him — are a step above the rest. It feels like the show’s been trying to recapture their Season 1 magic ever since.