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You may have felt the tremor: A jacked-up beast of a guy has wandered into TV Land, and his name is Reacher. Season 1 of the Amazon series that bears his name was a monster hit when it dropped in early 2022, and Season 2, which concludes on Jan. 19, appears to be even bigger, becoming Prime Video\u2019s No. 1 title globally on its debut weekend. And the series is crushing it critically the way Reacher crushes a villain\u2019s skull. As of early January, the new season had a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes<\/a>, with an 84 percent audience score \u2014 when do critics ever rate a brawny action show higher than the audience?<\/p>\n Everybody loves this \u201cReacher.\u201d<\/p>\n And by everybody, the reviews seem to suggest, that mostly means every man.<\/p>\n A review in Paste Magazine offered this pithy summation: \u201cI\u2019m not saying it\u2019s only for dudes, but I think we\u2019re in safe territory saying it\u2019s mostly<\/em> for dudes.\u201d And what dudes appear to like is minimal emoting and maximal fisticuffs, delivered by a mountain of muscle \u2014 a former Army investigator turned peripatetic crime-solver, who doesn\u2019t waste time wringing his enormous, meaty hands<\/a> over petty details like having a fixed abode or even a change of clothes.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the thing about \u201cReacher\u201d: Women watch it, too. Sure, 58 percent of the viewers for Season 1 were male, according to Nielsen. Still, that leaves a rather large number of people who are not. Common wisdom when it comes to Jack Reacher\u2019s popularity is that men want to be him and women want to be with him. But I\u2019ll venture that some women want to be him, too. Or at least, they want some of his freedom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Hatched by the writer Lee Child, Jack Reacher has anchored, since 1997, a series of best-selling novels that have long had a strong female readership \u2014 estimated in 2018 by their publisher, Penguin Random House, at around 60 percent<\/a>. One of their biggest mainstream champions is a woman<\/a>, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin. I have read about 20 of those novels, mostly in their natural habitats (flights, vacation rentals), and I\u2019m proud to share a fandom with the British writer Antonia Fraser, who in a letter to The Guardian in 2022, wrote,<\/a> \u201cThe thought that there is a new Jack Reacher to read in the evening makes the whole day whiz by happily.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n