Suburban Homeowner Starts, Loses Fight With Enormous Jack Reacher Star Alan Ritchson

For my money, the funniest recurring bit in Amazon's highly variable action-comedy series Reacher is the use it makes of its main character's blank, brutal sociopathy. Reacher, in Reacher , is generally righteous, but the code that he follows serves mostly to offer him one shortcut after another to outlandishly brutal violence. He is swift and certain in his assessment of every situation, which means that he is often doing stuff like brusquely folding some henchman's body like a fine-dining waiter might fold a discarded napkin, to the evident horror even of those otherwise on his side. Reacher will squint and mutter something like "It was one of Col. Grissom's kill team," or "He was with the Ecuadorians," if questioned about it, and some short time later, he will say "I want pancakes now" in roughly the same tone.

But that is just my opinion. If you polled most Reacher watchers, they would probably tell you that the funniest Reacher trope is how many characters try their luck against him in single combat. Reacher is canonically enormous, a Gronkowski-sized violence engine hard-wired to dispense compound fractures to those who exploit the vulnerable who is, paradoxically or not, absolutely catnip to members of the Exploit The Vulnerable community despite being effectively invulnerable himself. In Reacher , the role is played by the slightly less large but still objectively mountainous actor Alan Ritchson, and while the show throws in some visual gags grounded in Ritchson's size—two full-sized characters briefly obscured by his refrigerator-sized torso, one regulation-sized barbecue grill hurled through the window of a sedan—most of the size-related storytelling comes down to some version of this:

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