Reacher fans admit it's not great TV — but Netflix still can't make anything this watchable

The r/television thread is titled, with admirable honesty, "Reacher and Neagley aren't that great," and almost nobody in it disagrees with the premise. What makes the thread worth reading is where it goes next, because the same commenters conceding the shows are formulaic spent their upvotes explaining why they've watched every episode. The most-cited reason is a category Netflix is supposed to own:

"They're the perfect example of second monitor viewing that Netflix seems to f—k up."

— a commenter on r/television

The commenter's fuller point deserves a paraphrase: you don't have to pay close attention, yet the action sequences still carry weight, and characters matter because they actually do things and die. That's a precise inversion of the complaint that has dogged Netflix since an n+1 report circulated claiming the streamer's notes push writers toward "second screen" dialogue, where characters announce what they're doing for viewers who are mostly looking at their phones. Netflix engineered television for half-attention and made it disposable; Reacher arrived at the same destination by accident and made it sticky.

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The numbers behind the shrug

"Not that great" is carrying a remarkable load here, because the franchise's 2026 has been close to untouchable:

• Reacher season 4 (August 12 – September 16): 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, 66 million viewers in 28 days per Amazon, a top-five Prime Video original season ever, and a trajectory toward 10 billion minutes viewed per Nielsen.
• Neagley (September 16, all eight episodes): 1.78 billion minutes in its first five days — the No. 1 title across all of U.S. streaming that week — and 40 million viewers in 13 days, the fourth-biggest Prime original premiere on record.
• The lead-in trick: Amazon dropped the spinoff the same day as the Reacher finale, the Bosch-to-Ballard playbook executed at franchise scale. Neagley was renewed for season 2 on October 1, days after Reacher got a season 6 order with season 5 still filming.
• The endurance stat: Reacher has appeared in Prime Video's top 10 for 272 of the last 365 days.

Put the thread title next to that scoreboard and you get the strangest fan relationship in streaming.

Reacher has spent 272 of the past 365 days in Prime Video's top 10. The fan thread about it is titled "aren't that great."

The Neagley wrinkle

The thread's second theme is mild surprise that the spinoff might be the better show. Maria Sten's series trades some of the parent show's cartoon physics for an actual mystery, and the fans noticed:

"I'm enjoying Neagley way more than I thought I would."

— another r/television commenter, who finds it less silly and more investigative

Critics landed in the same place — Neagley holds 92% Certified Fresh, within a hair of Reacher's own score, and it skews measurably more female (49% of its audience, per Nielsen). Which completes the picture the thread was sketching without meaning to: Amazon has built a franchise that nobody calls great and everybody watches, expanded it with a spinoff that improves on the formula, and scheduled the whole thing so the audience never has a reason to leave. Netflix has spent years and several billion dollars chasing exactly this, with a design philosophy built for it, and the dads still live on Prime.

Previously we wrote: Lioness season 3 finale and season 4 renewal: Zoe Saldana fought Taylor Sheridan over the ending — and got her way