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Reacher is a show about a very large man punching his way through crime – and it’s perfect

With a fourth season on the horizon, viewers might wonder how much more Amazon can squeeze from a slim premise about a girthy hero. History suggests: enough!

Many of the action scenes resemble behind-the-scenes footage of Lord of the Rings, where you see the tiny child actors brought in to create a forced-perspective illusion that Ian McKellen was running around Middle-earth with a bunch of Hobbits – except in Reacher it’s just regular men, forced to stand near Alan Ritchson. It’s not even just violence – there’s a labours-of-Hercules logic to the show, exemplified in a season three episode where he is forced to take off all his clothes (the nudity of Jack Reacher is a recurring plot point) and swim across a punishing stretch of icy storm-tossed water to sustain a kind of Mrs Doubtfire-style farce of being seen in two places at once. The writers then decided that a man that large would be a kind of weird American folk legend, a libertarian wet dream who travels the country on greyhound buses, experiencing liberty so hard that he has shed all his belongings, all methods of communication, all family and friends.

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