Lee Child on ‘Reacher’ Season 3: ‘A classic lone wolf Reacher story’

Lee Child, the author behind the phenomenally successful books about the giant, iterant retired military policeman, and now executive producer to the equally successful show, talks about the reasons for choosing Persuader for Season 3, including the presence of a villain bigger than Reacher!

Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) walks into a record store with a box full of vinyl, and into trouble as always. This is the opening of Season 3 of Reacher, an adaptation of Lee Child’s Persuader, the seventh in his Jack Reacher series, which details the adventures of a retired Military Policeman, who walks into a town, smells something rotten, investigates and rights the wrongs, beating up the bad guys along the way.

“We had strategised it from the very beginning,” says Child over a video call from London. “We felt season one and season two introduced Reacher to the wider TV audience, by showing his real family in Season 1, (an adaptation of the first Reacher book, Killing Floor) and then showing his professional family in Season 2.”

Now that the viewer knows who Reacher is, said Child who is also executive producer on the series, the field was wide open. “We decided to do a classic, lone wolf Reacher story, and Persuader seemed right for that. It has a great location and opening. It has some great villains, including a sinister guy at the top of the conspiracy called Quinn.”

The huge bodyguard, Paulie, played by Olivier Richters, Child says, upped the stakes. “We know Reacher will have to fight him at some point, not straight away, maybe not in the third episode, maybe not in the fourth but we know it’s coming. So there’s a huge tension there — can Reacher beat a guy who is so much bigger than him?

There were no negatives from Season 1 and Season 2, Child says. “My dad, who was Irish, used to say he liked things the same, but different. We had to keep Reacher feeling the same, but give variety in terms of location, plot and the feel of the show. In Season 3, Reacher is all alone, with no support, no help, undercover and in danger all the time. It’s still a great Reacher story, but is a different flavour from what we’ve done before.”

Though Season 2, an adaptation of Bad Luck and Trouble, finds Reacher with friends, Child says, he is still on his own. “His choices have been different from theirs. That was part of the tension in Season 2. The others had moved on into jobs, they were professionals, with nice clothes and homes and all the things Reacher did not have and for a moment he thought, ‘Am I the idiot, or are they?’”

October 2024’s In Too Deep is the 29th book in the series. So there is plenty of material to adapt. “I hope we do them all,” Child says. The only problem is the arc that begins with the 14th book in the series, 61 Hours (2010). Reacher likes the sound of Susan Turner’s voice enough to decide to go and meet her. Turner is the commanding officer of the 110th Special Investigations Unit that Reacher set up. Through three books, Worth Dying For (2010), A Wanted Man (2012) and Never Go Back (2013), Reacher finally meets Turner in a satisfactory payoff.