Reacher's Writing Team Had A Few Key Rules That Guided The Series

"Reacher' has become a big hit for Prime Video, and part of that has to do with the writers' rules for their version of Jack Reacher. Showrunner Nick Santora spoke to The New York Times about respecting Lee Child's source novels and revealed that, in the three years "Reacher" has been on the air, he and his team have developed a set of guidelines to ensure they do justice to the book. "We had a list of dos and don'ts," Santora said. "Don't ever ask for cream and sugar in Reacher's coffee; he drinks black coffee. Don't ever have Reacher treat a woman as a second-class citizen because she might be smaller than he is — the truth is, everyone's smaller than he is."

Those are pretty much the same rules followed by the literary Reacher, who has now appeared in 29 novels and a book of short stories. But while there are numerous guidelines for how to write the on-screen and book version of the character, he is, as Santora noted, quite a straightforward man. "There's this very nice simplicity to the man, even though he's a complex character," said Santora, who previously revealed the biggest challenge in the "Reacher" writers' room was transferring Jack Reacher's inner monologue from the books to the screen without using voiceover. Otherwise, while there are clear rules to follow for the character, he's also just a big man who's great at fighting and shooting and simply can't countenance any form of injustice. While the show itself is basically one long action fantasy, then, like Jack Reacher himself, it's also quite a complicated thing to pull off.

When "Reacher" first debuted back in 2022, there was no guarantee it would become the major hit it did. In the 2010s, Tom Cruise starred in two movies based on Lee Child's popular book series, and while they were far from complete failures, fans weren't all that happy with the 5-foot-7-inch Cruise in a role that clearly demanded a bigger actor. As such, bringing the IP to the small screen was somewhat of a risk, especially with such fastidious fans waiting to see what Hollywood could do wrong next.

Happily, showrunner Nick Santora and his team of writers did an admirable job of adapting Child's novels into the hugely successful "Reacher" season 3, which broke a Prime Video viewing record. While a big part of the show's success comes down to the 6-foot-3-inch Alan Ritchson playing the lead role, the writers also clearly knew what they were doing in terms of taking the best parts of the books and bringing them to the screen. In a way, all they had to do was make sure Reacher was massive and the fights were good. But in another sense, the fans had already proven to be sticklers for the books, and as such, Santora and his team had to make sure they adhered to Child's vision as closely as possible.

Unfortunately, that's part of the reason we won't see fan-favorites Oscar Finlay (Malcom Goodwin) or Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald) in any future "Reacher" seasons, with Santora revealing that he and the writers deliberately kept the characters out of season 2 out of respect for the books' anthology approach, which sees Reacher in a new setting with new characters in every installment. Otherwise, the crew's fidelity to Child's novels has worked very well for the show, and while the rules themselves might be simple, actually following them to the extent that fans are happy with the outcome is a little more complicated than it might seem.