While Amazon Prime Video has certainly had its share of solid programming over the years, one of its biggest success stories has been a particular action-crime drama, one that has just returned for a new season after a long wait and it has perfect 100% scores from even a few dozen critics now, making it Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
That show, of course, is Reacher. Alan Ritchson is back as the ass-kicking ex-MP, barrelling into trouble wherever he goes, returning for season 3, adapting the book Persuader. The show is once again getting excellent critic scores, but yes, that 100% is its best ever. Season 1 had a 92%, season 2 (despite I would argue, being much worse) got a 98% from critics. Now with over two dozen critic reviews in, it has still maintained a 100%, and that many scores means it passes the Rotten Tomatoes threshold for being “Certified” fresh, which is not the case when you don’t have enough reviews in.
It’s too early to get a full sense of audience reviews now. There are only 50 or so in, and at a 76%, that’s not amazing, but again, 50 random viewers are a little different than 30 critics, and critics have seen more episodes in total. If instead we go over to IMDB, the new episodes score an 8.2-8.4 with hundreds of reviews in, above all of season 2’s episode scores, so that’s a very promising start by that metric.
It is obviously no surprise that Reacher has rocketed to #1 on Amazon Prime Video’s Top 10 list instantly, which has surpassed the also well-watched, high-scored Invincible. But Reacher has much broader appeal to a wide range of ages and interests, and it’s one of the things that helped keep it inside Amazon’s Top 10 TV list for effectively the entire nearly two year gap between seasons. You really do not ever see that with any other programs the service has. Fallout has been there for a long while now, but I don’t think it has the legs that Reacher does. Unfortunately for Amazon, its massively budgeted Rings of Power does not stay on the Top 10 list long, and since viewership supposedly fell 50% between seasons, that’s no great surprise.
Despite Reacher’s relatively grounded setting, it’s still supposed to have a budget of around $14 million an episode, emblematic of “streaming inflation” that is ballooning costs across all production (Severance and its many white hallways costs $20 million an episode). But I think Amazon is more than getting its money’s worth here, and Reacher is going to be around an extremely long time.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
