Reacher Season 3 Will Return to the Show’s Roots

The second season of Reacher may be over, but the wait shouldn’t be too long for Jack Reacher’s (Alan Ritchson) next adventure to grace our screens. The series was renewed for a third season by Prime Video even before Reacher became the most-watched show on the streaming service for 2023, and according to Ritchson’s instagram, filming for the next season appears to already be underway.

We don’t know yet which of Lee Child’s Reacher novels will serve as the inspiration for season 3, but according to the author, who serves as an executive producer for the show, “It’s a good choice, I gotta say. I think we’ve been very creative about how we’ve sequenced the type of story.”

Aside from this somewhat cryptic response, Child did give a hint about the type of adventure Reacher would be going on this season. “We felt we needed a book that was more Reacher alone for the third season. And so it was a question of which story would work best for that, and which one would have a great opening scene and all of that, and we found one that we loved.”

After Reacher’s epic team-up with the Special Investigators this season, some viewers may have been disappointed to see Reacher set off alone on the road again. Ritchson assures fans, however, that this is par for the course in Lee Child’s novels. In an interview with Collider, Ritchson says that, as much as he’d love to see people from Reacher’s past come back “because some of the actors and actresses are so good that it feels impossible to leave them behind,” he and the writers want to respect the anthology nature of the series that Child built and keep Reacher’s adventures “quite independent from one another.”

Though the actor was also tight-lipped about which book season three would adapt, he did say that season 3 is “going to continue to honor the books, in really keeping this an anthology,” and that “there’s no combining books” to fill up the season. According to Ritchson, the book they are adapting is “one of the favorites” and that “people are gonna like this book and it’s gonna be one of the best seasons yet.”

So far, the series has adapted Child’s first Reacher novel Killing Floor (season 1) and Bad Luck and Trouble (season 2) leaving 26 currently published books that the show could be adapting for season 3. The lone Reacher element narrows down the choices by about a handful, and there are about three books that are set chronologically before Killing Floor that aren’t likely choices, but this still leaves close to 20 books that season 3 could be adapting. 

Though many of us will certainly miss seeing the Special Investigators kick ass alongside every week, it will be interesting to see Reacher operate on his own once again, no matter which novel season 3 adapts.