Neagley review: This Reacher spin-off is more serious and sensitive – if not particularly surprising

It would be difficult for casually dressed colossus Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) to expand any further than he already has, but the TV franchise based on Lee Child's books has just got bigger: here's a spin-off for the best of Reacher's recurring sidekicks, private investigator Frances Neagley (Maria Sten). It’s essentially Reacher without Reacher – and without the jokes; two major drawbacks that the new show has a good go at overcoming.

Apart from a barnstorming cameo from the sentient obelisk himself at the start and a second, really rather touching appearance by Reacher at the end, Neagley is on her own, and she quickly establishes herself as a different kind of avenging hero: yes, she wins every fist-fight and shootout, no matter what odds are against her – even distant snipers who have her in their sights stand no chance – but as she tackles the case of an old schoolfriend who may have been murdered in imaginative fashion by a cult, she reveals herself to be more vulnerable and complex than the untouchable Reacher.

We are in Neagley’s home city, Chicago, where she earns a living as a maverick private investigator who regularly appals her boss at the big private-investigation agency by ignoring his instructions, dealing insensitively with clients and angering the city’s police department with her ability to solve crimes before they’ve put down their coffee and donuts. The cops are further suspicious of Neagley due to her retired police officer father Calvin (Tyrone Benskin), who is now on his death bed but was, rumour has it, so averse to protocol in his day that he might even have been corrupt.

A startling death kicks the story off: a young man walks, entranced, down a subway track, into the path of an oncoming train. That Neagley knows the deceased is more than just a prompt to make her take the case. He was a lifelong friend who had become estranged, and her grief and guilt lead her to reconsider a trauma in her childhood.

Previously, Neagley’s fear of physical contact with other humans has been an amusing quirk; now it’s a mental health issue, and a sign that this show is more serious than its parent series. When Neagley’s dad angrily refuses to answer her questions, it seems as if it is heading somewhere forbiddingly dark.

Look past the shifted emotional landscape, however, and the nuts and bolts of it are pure Reacher. Neagley gradually acquires a crew, starting with a disaffected police officer – in this case Hudson Riley (Greyston Holt), a good cop trying to outrun the fact that the rest of his family are petty gangsters – and eventually including scrappy street hustler Keno (Jasper Jones) and the elegant but fearsomely focused Renee (Adeline Rudolph), a Brit who answers the phones at the investigation agency but wants Neagley to mould her into a PI.

The supporting trio are brave, plucky and blessed with the ability to repeatedly cheat certain death in the form of henchmen with machine guns: a classic Reacher-esque posse.

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The plot takes us to a sinister, out-of-town religious enclave led by a creepily double-denimed Australian named Lawrence (Damon Herriman), who initiates couples into the cult by making the husband wait in his office while he has sex with the wife next door. Lawrence also has a terrifyingly Old Testament way of disciplining underlings, but Neagley and co come to suspect that the real business of the sect is very modern and extremely dangerous.

It’s not an innovative or particularly surprising thriller, but the personnel are easy to root for and, at the centre, Sten is a strong lead, making Neagley somehow impervious and deeply sensitive, acutely emotionally intelligent but unable to control her own feelings.

She’s as nuanced as the protagonist in a show like this realistically can be. As an entertaining bonus for fans that’s both different to Reacher and the same, Neagley calmly gets the job done.

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