Alan Ritchson's Prime Video Reacher Return Makes Streaming History

Published Sep 20, 2026, 9:17 PM EDT

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

Back in the day, when a network had a hit show, it was enough to just milk it for as many seasons as it was profitable and then end it. But now, in the streaming era, when a streaming service has a hit show, they expand it into a shared Marvel-style cinematic universe with sequels and prequels and spinoffs.

Spinoffs have always been a thing, but they’ve gotten more and more prevalent in the age of streaming. The streamers live and die by their subscriber base, and some subscribers are just there for one show, so they’ll turn that one show into an entire library of shows to satiate those subscribers. Paramount+ is chock full of Yellowstone spinoffs, Netflix is piling up the Stranger Things offshoots, and HBO is about to spend the next decade readapting all seven Harry Potter books into a lavish, big-budget TV drama.

Prime Video is one of the most notorious streamers for this Marvel-ification of streaming; they’ve spun off Bosch, The Boys, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and now Reacher, too. Reacher just ended its fourth season with an appropriately explosive and bittersweet finale, and on the same day, Amazon served up the perfect dessert course: the entire first season of Reacher’s first spinoff, Neagley.

Maria Sten takes center stage and effortlessly carries the new series. Neagley is every bit the hypercompetent, hypercharismatic badass that Reacher is, but in a totally different way; she’s rougher, meaner, and somehow even deadlier. Neagley has proven to be a slightly weirder, slightly darker show than Reacher, taking us into the heart of a creepy cult, which was a breath of fresh air; it’s Reacher meets Resident Evil 4. But at the same time, it’s got the goods: the action is just as slickly directed and sharply choreographed as Reacher, and the pacing is just as wonderfully intense.

Reacher's Return In Neagley Avoids A Modern TV Trend

Before Neagley premiered on Prime, we’d been promised that Alan Ritchson would reprise his role as Reacher in the new spinoff. This is a common marketing tactic to drum up some excitement for a spinoff, whether it’s a couple of O.G.s coming back for cameos in How I Met Your Father or Jeff Goldblum showing up to give testimony in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul will be back in Better Call Saul’s final season, etc.

Since the returning star is the hook they’re dangling in front of a dubious audience, spinoffs usually make that audience wait until the finale, or at least the second half of the season, before the flagship character shows up. Gen V waited until the season 1 finale to have Homelander swoop down onto the campus of Godolkin University and fight Marie Moreau and her friends. Welcome to Derry had It show up in a few different forms before finally putting Bill Skarsgård back in the Pennywise makeup.

But Neagley didn’t make us wait to see Reacher show up; the spinoff had Reacher in a bunch of scenes right upfront. Going back to Seven Samurai, the rules of action storytelling dictate that we need to be introduced to the hero (or, in this case, reintroduced to the hero) through an undeniable act of heroism. Before Neagley starts investigating her childhood friend’s death and discovers the cult that lured him in, we see her team up with Reacher to rescue a kidnapped girl.

After the first Neagley-free season of Reacher, it was relieving to see Neagley’s spinoff open with a mini Reacher/Neagley adventure. It’s always a delight to see these two characters working together to crack a case and foil a bad guy, and even after they’ve saved the day, Reacher sticks around for a baseball game. Neagley could’ve withheld its Reacher cameo, but mercifully spared its audience from that frustration.

Neagley

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  Greyston Holt

  Detective Hudson Riley

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  Maria Sten

  Frances Neagley