‘Reacher’ Isn’t Just for Dads, It’s for Everyone Who Dreams of Living Free, Says Author Lee Child (Exclusive)

The character’s creator explains how ‘Reacher’ provides a cathartic fantasy for anyone who’s frustrated with everyday life

Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher in ‘Reacher’ Season 2.Brooke Palmer/Prime Video

Reacher has an affectionate and not undeserved reputation as a show for dads. According to Nielsen, two-thirds of the hit action drama’s Season 2 viewers are people over 50, and 58 percent of those people are male.

The conventional wisdom is that men like Reacher because they can live vicariously through Jack Reacher, the stoic protagonist of author Lee Child’s book series and its Prime Video adaptation, where he’s played by charismatic giant Alan Ritchson.

Reacher has a brilliant logical mind that always makes him the smartest dude in the room, and a tall, muscular body that always makes him the strongest dude in the room. He uses his mind and body to get justice for people who have been wronged.

He lives a nomadic existence with no worldly attachments, and his only possessions are the clothes on his back. He does what he wants when he wants. You know, guy stuff.

But a show as big as Reacher doesn’t get there by only appealing to one group of people. The not-so-secret secret to Reacher‘s success is that it’s not just dads who want to be smart, strong and free; it’s everybody. Lee Child figured this out a long time ago.

“When I wrote the first book and reviewed it in my head, I thought, okay, yeah, this is a guy book. This is something that men are gonna respond to,” he told The Messenger in a recent Zoom interview from the room where he keeps his guitar collection.

“But I was worried about how women would respond to it, because he’s a rough, tough individual. You know, basically a filthy, dirty barbarian. Owns nothing, never changes his clothes. All that kind of stuff.” He didn’t think women would like Reacher. He was wrong.

“It is actually more of a woman show than a man’s, because women want the same thing,” the executive producer of the series said. “They want that commitment-free, responsibility-free fantasy. Women would love to walk away tomorrow and be in a different town with nothing hanging over them just as much as men do.”

“And so that is what I learned,” he continued. “It’s not a dad show. It’s a mum and dad show.”

In Child’s experience, Reacher is for anyone who’s sick of the stresses of everyday life, which happens to everyone at some point. There are more problems than there is money to solve them. “Your car needs fixing, your roof is leaking. You just want to walk away,” Child said. “And that’s the fantasy that Reacher gives anybody.”

Alan Ritchson in ‘Reacher.’Brooke Palmer/Prime Video

Reacher also provides an outlet for base instincts of punishing wrongdoers in a way civilized society doesn’t allow. Reacher believes in an eye-for-an-eye form of justice, and he will beat down or even kill people with no compunction if he feels they deserve it.

“If Reacher’s walking down the street and he sees somebody slap his girlfriend, that guy is in big trouble,” Child says. Or if that guy tries to carjack a mother with a child in the backseat, Reacher will pull him out through the driver’s side window and smash his head in the door.

Child trusts readers and viewers to be sophisticated enough to find Reacher’s vigilante justice cathartic, but not endorse it.

“Of all the millions of viewers on Amazon, I’m sure 99 percent of them are lovely people, and yet they thrill to Reacher cutting corners and doing stuff that is really not right.

Why did they do that? It’s because they understand deep down this is not a textbook for how to live,” Child said. “This is compensation for the frustrations of living.”

“We know, of course we must have due process. We must have rights for the accused. We must have all kinds of fairnesses and safeguards. We know that, but it’s boring. It’s annoying,” Child said with a smile. It’s more fun to see the bad guy get instant karma than get put on trial in front of a jury of his peers.

“The sequence at the end of every story where Reacher cleans it up and gets rid of the bad guy in whatever gruesome manner that that he does, I think people understand that’s a metaphor for the justice process afterwards.”

In other words, dads — and moms, and their children too — know that they live in a society. But it’s fun to pretend that they don’t. And for 45 minutes at a time, Reacher provides an escape to a simpler world, where justice and freedom are not abstract concepts, but rather take physical form in the body of one ass-kicking man.