I’ve been watching Reacher weekly this season, and it’s been a nice watercooler addition to the 2025 TV schedule. After each episode, I don’t mind talking about body count, or which characters I think are gonna throw wrinkles into the outcome, or whether it’s fair Alan Ritchson is literally that cut. This week, however, one conversation about the Lee Childs series caught my eye, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Jason Pargin, the humor writer known for John Dies at the End, pointed out that in another era the Reacher show we access with an Amazon Prime subscription likely would have been a network TV show that threw episodes at audiences weekly without fail, even over the holidays. He joked on Threads that’s it’s not a fair shakedown fans will have only gotten 24 episodes by the end of Season 3.
What SICKENS me about Hollywood is that in my youth, a show like Reacher would be cranking out 26 episodes a year, a new series landing every September like clockwork. We should be waiting for episode 68 to drop. There should be three Christmas episodes by now.
Amusingly, he also name-dropped specific instances of what we would have likely seen on Reacher (so far) had it gotten the network TV. As he keeps going, I’m getting all the Grey’s Anatomy and Newhart vibes.
We should have an episode where, while hallucinating, they have to do a Wizard of Oz parody. They should have added a sassy sidekick and then killed them off five different times. There should be a clip show where he remembers his old adventures while trapped in a sinking car.
The tweets are really funny, and it’s no surprise they’ve landed more than 39,000 likes so far, along with thousands of response comments. I, too, saw them, and I cannot stop thinking about how the TV landscape has changed in the last twenty years, but I’m not sure I could commit to 26 episodes of Reacher.
Listen while a joke, there’s also truth to this thread. We’ve all seen the wild bottle episodes and more concepts network television has attempted over the years. For example, how many times has the hospital in Grey's Anatomy suffered a catastrophe?
Plus, cast members on tons of network TV shows have spoken out about the grueling hours being a traditional TV man or woman entails. Twenty-two to 26 episodes is probably too many, but I also think there’s an argument that could and maybe should be made that Reacher should be longer than eight episodes a season.
Yes, eight. That’s all we get once a year. It’s really fundamentally not enough. We’ll talk Reacher every day for two months and then it disappears into the ether the other 10 months each year only to pop back up when we least expect it. For the biggest, best Amazon prime shows people will keep coming back, but it’s easy for certain streaming shows to fall through the cracks. To me, a nice number like 12 episodes would be a much greater fit and could be parceled out over a spring, fall, or summer window. Some streaming shows get that. Not nearly enough do, though.
Listen, I get that budgets are determined quite differently for streaming shows, and one of the biggest pros is that shows like Reacher allow actors to be a part of big, splashy TV shows and still take a movie or side project or two a year. In a lot of ways the format works and helps shows to avoid that trap of remember “old adventures while trapped in a sinking car.” On the other hand, though, it’s hard to argue Reacher will ever have the cultural significance or legacy of something like Magnum P.I., probably because Magnum had already hit 24 episodes just a few episodes into Season 2.
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