While Reacher might be one of Prime Video’s biggest hits ever, an earlier crime drama from the same streaming service pioneered its successful formula as far back as 2015. Based on the book series of the same name by British author Lee Child, Reacher is a hit action thriller for Prime Video.
Starring Alan Ritchson as the eponymous soldier of fortune, each season of Reacher sees the military veteran travel across different parts of America, rooting out criminality, conspiracies, and corruption wherever he goes. One of Amazon’s best crime thriller shows ever,, Reacher blends bruising violence with sharp, unpredictable mystery plotting to make for irresistible TV.
Bosch Pioneered Reacher’s Anthology Procedural Format
However, as effective as this mix might be, Reacher isn’t the first Prime Video hit to take this approach. The seven-season Prime Video series Bosch, which ran from 2015 until 2022, shared a lot of DNA with the later hit. Bosch stars Titus Welliver as the titular LAPD detective Harry Bosch, who solves homicides in Hollywood.
Like Reacher, this series was also based on a long-running series of bestselling books, this time by The Lincoln Lawyer author Michael Connelly. Like Reacher, each season of Bosch was also essentially a self-contained story, and the biggest selling point of the series was the title character, a mercurial genius whose ability to solve crimes didn’t allow him to solve the puzzle of his own life.
Bosch and Reacher also both made the most of the creative freedom that Prime Video afforded them, as the two shows were more violent, R-rated, and profane than their network TV equivalents. Although they were hardly as transgressive as the likes of Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, Bosch and Reacher both upped the ante of TV violence.
Reacher Replicated Bosch’s Formula With One Major Change
While Prime Video’s Reacher replacement Scarpetta took a similar approach, also adapting a long-running novel series with a titular protagonist, that 2026 debut made one major mistake. Unlike Reacher, Bosch was a tortured protagonist who struggled with his demons as much as the show’s villains.
In contrast, Reacher is less angsty and more confident, even if his erratic love life and fear of commitment do hint at a lot of underlying trauma from his shady past. Scarpetta made the mistake of focusing too much on the family drama and internal turmoil of its heroine and not enough on its central mystery, something Bosch fortunately avoided throughout its run.
As such, Bosch was a huge franchise-spawning hit since viewers were happy to return to the detective’s story in the follow-up series Bosch: Legacy, the prequel Bosch: Start of Watch, and the spinoff Ballard. Since Bosch had become the franchise that kept giving, it is perhaps unsurprising that Reacher replicated its successful formula to much acclaim.
- Release Date
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February 3, 2022
- Network
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Prime Video
- Showrunner
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Nick Santora
