You’ve got male: Billy Bob Thornton in Landman; Alan Ritchson in Reacher; and Kevin Costner in Yellowstone.
Alan Ritchson looks like a sock stuffed with walnuts. He’s beefy and bulgy with a bright white smile and the kind of focused determination that wills a body like that into existence. On Instagram, he’s constantly running, lifting and eating, telling his followers “Your body is your billboard” as he sprints shirtless and sweaty up and down a hill.
As the star of Reacher, in which the nearly two-metre-tall former underwear model plays the silent but violent US Army major in Lee Childs’ best-selling crime series, he punches windows, smacks heads and dangles from buildings. He can slay authority figures – whom he mostly distrusts – with one-liners, and charm the ladies with limited dialogue.
In person, the 42-year-old is much more voluble than his alter ego and a lot less imposing. He’s tall, sure, but not the man mountain he presents on screen.
Alan Ritchson plays Lee Child’s enduring hero in the TV series Reacher.
“People mention it, and I’m like, ‘Am I that big?’” says Ritchson. “I don’t feel like it. I grew up a bit of a runt. I was a very late bloomer. I was 17½, I think, when I started to grow. So for me, I will probably always be stuck in this mindset of, ‘I’m the same size as everybody else.’ And then I see myself on screen, and I’m like, ‘No, I look like an ogre.’”
Ritchson is in Sao Paulo, Brazil, ahead of Reacher’s season three launch at pop culture festival CCXP. Based on the seventh Reacher book, Persuader, season three involves Reacher going undercover for the Drug Enforcement Agency to take down a large-scale drug smuggler. He is, as always, aided from afar by former army colleague turned private investigator Frances Neagley (Maria Sten).
The series is one of Amazon Prime Video’s biggest hits worldwide. When the first three episodes of season two were released in late 2023, the show clocked up 1.7 billion viewing minutes in its first three days of release, according to ratings agency Nielsen.
And while Amazon likes to stress Reacher is a hit with men and women, young and old, according to Nielsen, more than 50 per cent of the show’s audience is male, with two-thirds of that audience aged over 50 years old.
In other words, it’s peak Dad TV. It’s not cool, but it’s highly watchable. The kind of show in which men are men, respect is king and the hero is definitely wearing jeans, and most likely a hat. If he doesn’t have a truck, he’s got a horse, sometimes both. Think US shows Yellowstone, Landman and The Old Man, and even local international hit Territory, which had jeans, hats, horses, helicopters and dingoes.
Men in hats: Michael Dorman as Graham Lawson, Robert Taylor as his father, Colin Lawson, in Territory.
Like Reacher, they’re all streaming hits centred on dudes who solve problems. They’re hypermasculine, but not toxic, as respect and manners are high on the Dad TV agenda.
“It’s the idea that, ‘Look, I can make a difference, I can control things, I have authority, I have power,’” says associate professor Bruce Isaacs, a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Sydney. “And it’s those sorts of stories where that old figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Sylvester Stallone, doesn’t really cut it any more.
Reacher can be classified as Dad TV, where the male leads are listened to.
“Instead, you have these different sorts of males who are assuming a kind of control, but it isn’t necessarily that over-the-top excess of hypermasculinity. It’s kind of a dad narrative. It’s the respectability, the truth, the authenticity.”
In other words, it’s everything dads – and excuse the broad generalisation here – think they are not getting at home from their teenagers. Or from those Millennials at work. It’s a world where everything makes sense and no one cares you’ve been wearing the same T-shirt and jeans for the past three weeks (or, in Reacher’s case, three seasons). Or where you are going (probably to the shops, but maybe to save the world).
Maria Sten returns as private investigator Frances Neagley in season three of Reacher.
“It’s almost nostalgia for the simplicity of a kind of maleness that was so important in Hollywood,” says Isaacs. “Streamers have really taken this and run with it … And if you look at the way the world is interpreting things like gender and the way gender operates, it doesn’t surprise me that we start seeing these narratives come up that are trying to affirm more traditional, in inverted commas, wholesome ways of being a male.”
(As a side note, Isaacs doesn’t think there is such a thing as Mum TV – instead, there has been an increase in women stepping into more traditionally masculine, problem-solving roles, such as Keri Russell’s character in The Diplomat and Lashana Lynch’s MI6 agent in The Day of the Jackal.)
For Child, who created the character for his 1997 novel Killing Floor, the appeal of Reacher lies in the fact that people want safety and control in their lives and Reacher allows them to live, for better or worse, vicariously.
“I still believe people are basically full of goodwill and want to do the right thing,” says Child, who is as tall as Ritchson, but about a third of his build. “But they’re usually prevented from doing it, either by some personal inadequacy – they’re intimidated, inhibited, physically not capable of it, or whatever – so people in the real world live with a buzz of frustration the whole time.
“It’s a profoundly miserable thing if you want to do the right thing, and you can’t. You don’t feel good about it. So you need a proxy, and Reacher is absolutely the proxy. He is you, and he is going to do the right thing no matter what.”
That desire to do the right thing, no matter what, has also led to Reacher gaining traction in right-wing circles, while critics of the show have called it a “glaringly white fantasy”. And while that may be true on screen – pop culture site Vulture said it was “like watching a frightening manifestation of the free-falling American empire on a loop” – it doesn’t track with Ritchson’s beliefs offscreen.
Alan Ritchson, Serinda Swan and Josh Blacker in season two of Reacher.
He has spoken openly about supporting causes such as Black Lives Matter, and in a Hollywood Reporter interview in April last year, he railed against Donald Trump, calling him “a con man, and yet the entire Christian church seems to treat him like he’s their poster child, and it’s unreal”.
Does Ritchson ever worry about how his fans react to his personal beliefs?
“That’s confusing for a lot of people, that I can play somebody like that and my personal beliefs be so different,” he says. “But it’s acting, and this is a character who predated the show by decades … But look, I’ve never been one to think that my religious or political beliefs need to align with the character.
“In fact, I think it’s far more fun to play people that are very different than myself in that way. I think we conflate the two, and that’s dangerous territory, to think that there’s some expectation that a fictional character and our personal beliefs need to align or there’s some kind of hypocrisy there. It’s ridiculous.”
Ritchson thinks deeply about how his hypermasculine TV persona is reflected in real life, especially when it comes to how his three young sons see him. He is, quite literally, dad on TV.
“I work very hard to teach my boys that kindness matters more to me than material success, and that I care very much about them learning how to explore and vocalise their feelings and emotions,” says Ritchson. “It’s a misnomer that men are not as emotional as women. We just are told from a very early age to tamp that stuff down and not talk about it, and that is toxic.
“And I think we’re coming to an age where people can talk about that and we recognise that a healthy society is one, in large part, where men are healthy and vulnerable, and I want to teach my boys to be that. That is a beautiful thing to me, and that is what masculinity is all about. There’s a real power in being brave enough to access your feelings. I teach them that and try to exemplify that myself every day. I don’t know if that’s very Reacher.”
It’s not very Reacher, but it is top-notch fatherly advice.
Reacher season three streams on Amazon Prime Video from February 20.
The writer travelled to Brazil as a guest of Amazon Prime Video.
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