Reacher opens at a nondescript family diner in the fictional town Margrave Georgia, the kind of place familiar to anyone who’s driven through the South. A man drags a woman out the front door to their van parked alongside, a nondescript working-class American and his battered wife. She’s tearful and apologetic. He maintains a constant stream of verbal abuse. A few yards away another man is staring at them in disgust. “What are you looking at stupid,” the abusive husband says to the second man, puffing out his chest. “Sorry,” he adds, now apologetic, suddenly changing tone, getting a better look at at the 6’5″, 250 pound slab of American beef staring in their direction. “I’m having a bad day. It won’t happen again.”

Jack Reacher has that effect on people. An Iraq War vet in his early 40s living off his Army pension, Reacher has no problem with kicking the ever loving shit out of bullies and assholes, scumbags who prey on the innocent and defenseless. It is in fact what he lives for. A knight errant, a wandering Samurai traveling the earth like Cain in Kung Fu, he has no fixed address, no wife or children, or even a mobile phone. The son of an American Army officer, the grandson of a hero of the French Resistance, he grew up on a series of military bases all over the world with his older brother Joe. It was not a happy childhood. The United States Army is a hierarchical institution, and army bases, whether they are located in Okinawa, Texas or Germany, have a pecking order that must be obeyed. The children of high ranking officers get to bully other kids without consequences. The children of junior officers have to take it. That’s just the way things are.

No sooner does he sit down to breakfast then Jack Reacher notices that the diner is surrounded by police cars. He has no idea that he is the prime suspect in a murder that had taken place the night before, or how deeply corrupt and evil the town of Margrave really is. Dragged off to jail by the police, he meets two people who will become his allies, and even friends,  Sergeant Roscoe Conkling, a beautiful young woman in her late 20s who is immediately attracted to the hunky murder suspect, who she immediately determines is innocent, and Chief Detective Oscar Finlay, a black Harvard graduate from Boston, a by the book liberal intellectual who is, like Reacher, a fish out of water in the corrupt, conservative South.

That Alan Ritchson, who plays Jack Reacher, is an evangelical Christian and minister, is an irony that few of the mostly positive reviews of the first season of Reacher have noted. Superhero movies, the dominant cinematic genre of the 2010s, have been a substitute for religion for the culturally liberal, even radical, millennial generation. Whether bitten by mutant spiders, exiled from planets with a heavier system of gravity, strong with “the force,” or in possession of superior technology, superheroes are more akin to demigods than mere mortals. Paradoxically that opens up their casting to a wider variety of actors and actresses. Superman in civilian clothes looks like any other newspaper reporter. Luke Skywalker, played by the 5’9″ Mark Hamill, is immediately bullied as soon as he sets foot in the mutant bar at Mos Eisley Space Port. Rey, his heir, played by Daisey Ridley, has come under constant criticism for being a “Mary Sue,” an ordinary young woman who gives no sign of any ability to give the “First Order” much trouble. Peter Parker would have ended up as an incel had the mutant spider not come along. Jack Reacher, however, who has no special powers and no access to superior technology, seemed ridiculous when played by the diminutive Tom Cruise. His character demands an actor who looks like an NFL lineman. Alan Ritchson more than fits the bill. One look at Ritchson and almost anybody with any sense acts like the man in the opening scene. “Sorry. I’m having a bad day. It won’t happen again.” Ritchson is a human wrecking machine. The only mystery is why he served for 20 years in the same US military that had made his childhood so miserable. He could have easily become a multimillionaire on the front line of the Philadelphia Eagles.

Jack Reacher, in other words, is a secular super hero, an ordinary man who depends on his brawn, and as it turns out, his brains. There are no long high tech computer generated fight scenes. Reacher depends on smart writing and an engaging mystery. As such, it is a compelling look into a devastated “red” America, its economy dependent on corrupt, criminal oligarchs, a savage culture of violence and despair underlying even the most affluent surface. Reacher is a TV series full of damaged people. Everybody, from the good, Reacher himself, Roscoe, and Finley, to the morally compromised and out of their depth, an innocent banker and his family trapped in a counterfeiting and money laundering scheme, to the evil, most of the town, a corrupt mayor, corporate executive and his demented, emotionally disturbed son, a dirty FBI agent, racist police officers, Venezuelan contract killers, the local prison industrial complex, is damaged in one way or another. Very few people in Reacher can make genuine human contact. Roscoe, descended from one of the town’s leading families fallen on hard times, has lost her beloved mentor. Finley, so distraught about his wife in Boston, continues to pay for her cell phone bill so he can hear her voice on voicemail. One of the few innocent police officers is savagely murdered along with his wife and unborn child. Reacher, in turn, has never been able to make any contact at all. He has no living family members other than a brother, who we later learn is part of the town’s central mystery.

Indeed, up until arriving in Margrave, Reacher had no idea what his brother even did for a living, odd considering how they are portrayed in flashbacks as children, as close friends who stood up to bullies, and the army pecking order together. How exactly did a man like Reacher end up a lonely drifter wandering America on foot, an outcast vagrant who, like Johnny Rambo in First Blood, is thrown into prison simply because he stops to get something to eat. It’s another part of the series many critics miss. Reacher may not have superpowers, but he is a fantasy nonetheless. His memories are unreliable. Does his beloved brother even exist? Were they good friends? Was his mother the charming French lady who loved both her boys equally? Or was there something much darker in Reacher’s childhood we don’t see up front. Reacher’s mind is frozen in adolescence. If he lives to deliver payback to bullies, it’s because he sees the world from the point of view of a bullied high school kid, a young boy living on a series of military bases where he is constantly dragging his parents into a series of scandals as he and his brother refuse to submit to the privileged status of the children of the higher ranking officers. We’ve all been there. American society depends on hierarchy, on submitting to hazing and bullying in the hopes that we may some day get to be the bullies ourselves. But most of us hate it. If only we could be like Jack Reacher, a 6’5″ man mountain who can’t be bullied, who turns the tables on the bullies and defends the innocent and defenseless.

We can, but only for an hour. When the show is over we have to go back to our ordinary lives. And Jack Reacher, after he and his friends have cleaned up the evil afoot in Margrave, can’t stay, even though he has fallen in love and made a real friend. He is an outcast who must stay an outcast and, in the end, we see him wandering alone along the highway, a man who will never be married, own a house, have children, or find genuine happiness. Jack Reacher, like so many Americans in 2022, is a sad, damaged man with no hope of genuine redemption, only an occasional rush of adrenaline when he gets to kick ass.