Amazon Prime Video sure has snapped up the rights to a lot of good book source material, and it turns out this entire time they’ve had an Alex Cross series in the works, the prolific hero written by James Patterson across 32 books now, and counting. Here, it’s just called “Cross.”
While detective Alex Cross has been played in movies twice by Morgan Freeman and once by Tyler Perry(?), now it’s Aldis Hodge taking up the mantle. He’s a SAG-winning actor who was recently one of the only good parts of DC’s Black Adam playing Hawkeye. Now, he’s got this high profile part.
Cross dropped all eight episodes of its first season this past week, and has been planted as the #1 series on the service since then, unseating lingering viewings of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s very clear that Amazon is attempting to create another Reacher-type success on the service, an adaptation of a big, crime-solving hero from popular novels that have essentially unlimited source material to draw on.
Is Cross actually good? It’s decent, it seems. Critic score is sitting at a 76% and audience score at a 72%. If we want to compare that to Reacher, it’s not doing as well. Season 1 of that show had a 92%/91% critic audience split. Season 2 had a 98%/78% score, which seems kind of insane to me, as that season was not good. But I guess I’m the minority critical opinion there. In any case, no, Cross isn’t doing quite as well, but if it gets the viewership, slightly lower review scores aren’t going to matter. And in fact, the show was greenlit for season 2 before season 1 even aired, so clearly Amazon has some big plans for it. It helps that shows like this are relatively cheap compared to the sprawling budgets that other Amazon series have.
This feels like a show that’s probably going to do well over the long term. I’ve read a dozen Alex Cross books over the years, and I certainly like the character enough to check out this series when I get a moment. I mean the books aren’t exactly utterly life-changing or anything, so a pretty good show adapting a pretty good series is all you can really hope for. And I like Aldis Hodge in everything I’ve seen him in, and I expect that he does good work here as well.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
