I’m watching Season Three of Reacher—my husband, who loves the books, is also suffering through it—and I am furious. Not just at the show, which is violently dull and predictably brutal, but at the culture that continues to treat this blood-soaked void as serious storytelling. We’re three seasons in, and the only evolution is that Reacher keeps finding new ways to kill people.

Critics love it. The Seattle Times says it’s well-done entertainment through and through. Forbes calls it over-the-top fun. IGN praises a righteous good time. Collider declares the season a propulsive and exciting story. Even The Guardian gives it a thumbs up. 

Let’s be clear about what they’re celebrating: a show where a man executes others in elevators, basements, parking garages, and forests—with military precision and not a flicker of regret. Reacher, across three seasons, has killed more than 70 people—and we’re not done yet. He does so without hesitation or consequence. The violence is steady, and the message is clear: restraint is for lesser men.

Reacher isn’t just the lead—he’s the reward. He tortures, maims, and murders without consequence, and the show frames that as part of the pleasure. His blankness is styled as confidence. His detachment is treated as charm. Most telling is how often the series pairs his violence with sex, as if physical dominance is its own justification. The women he sleeps with aren’t characters with interiority or arcs; they’re passing comforts before he moves on, which he always does. This, we’re told, is compelling television.

Meanwhile, love stories—Bridgerton, Nobody Wants This, the millions of romances readers devour every week—are treated as lightweight. They’re dismissed as too emotional or too joyful. Critics reject them because they center care instead of conquest, and we continue to act surprised when they succeed. That dismissal is not neutral. It reveals what kind of storytelling we’re still willing to sideline: anything that prioritizes connection over domination. A man who kills without hesitation and sleeps with women he barely knows is cast as a paragon. He is praised for his control, admired for his silence. That silence, increasingly, sounds familiar. It rhymes with the detached, grievance-fed fantasy that animates a lot of darker corners of the internet—where vulnerability is weakness, and intimacy is beneath you.

Reacher doesn’t just reflect that fantasy; it flatters it. It packages violence as virtue and hollowness as charisma, then calls it entertainment. The culture eats it up. This is about what we keep celebrating as a good time—what we rush to recommend, reward, and renew, while other kinds of stories are waved off as niche or slight.

If this is what we call heroic, maybe it’s time we asked who’s writing the definition.

a note:

To be clear, if you like Reacher, that’s fine. We can enjoy something and still question what it’s doing. The entertainment industry has spent decades not just producing stories like this, but elevating them. My frustration isn’t with viewers. It’s with the machine that keeps insisting this is what counts as entertainment.