We’ve seen a teaser for Reacher’s third season, headed to Prime Video this coming February. But now we have the first official trailer and it has renewed my hope in this show, after a truly abysmal second season.
Season 2 was a huge disappointment—I included it in my Worst TV Shows Of 2024 list—after the debut season was a close to perfect adaptation of the first Lee Child “Reacher” novel, Killing Floor. Beyond its many plot holes and lackluster plot, the second season saw Reacher team up with his ex-army buddies, which kind of defeats the entire point of Reacher being a one-man army who can take down even the most intimidating foes all by his lonesome. Details matter, as the characters in Season 2 never stopped reminding us.
Don’t get me wrong: Reacher almost always has help in some form or another. He had help from Roscoe and Finlay in Season 1, but they weren’t fighting alongside him. The fight scenes in Season 2 were almost all terrible by comparison.
Season 3 looks like a return to form. Here’s the trailer:
This season is based on the seventh “Reacher” novel, Persuader. Of the books in the series that I’ve read, this is my second favorite after Killing Floor, and one of the better ones I can think of to adapt for TV. I won’t spoil what happens in the book, but the official logline for the season reads: “In the third season of the action-packed series, Reacher (Alan Ritchson) hurtles into the dark heart of a vast criminal enterprise when trying to rescue an undercover DEA informant whose time is running out. There he finds a world of secrecy and violence—and confronts some unfinished business from his own past.”
Reacher will team up with DEA Susan Duffy (Sonya Cassidy) who, if the story follows the book, will also be our leading man’s romantic interest this time around. Reacher will go up against a cabal of criminals including Paulie (Olivier Richters) pictured in the top image of this post. As you can see, he’s quite a lot bigger than Reacher. He’s also a very bad dude. Anthony Michael Hall also joins the cast as Zackary Beck, the chief antagonist of the season.
The first three episodes of Reacher drop on Thursday, February 20th with subsequent episodes landing on Prime Video each week. I will be reviewing here on this blog. Fingers crossed that this season lives up to the first and that writer and showrunner Nick Sanotra learned from the second season’s mistakes.
