 Once again, I have returned to talk about something that most people do not care about in the slightest, but the people who do care about it are really into it. I am, of course, talking about Jack Reacher. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. You have probably heard of Jack Reacher before. It is one of the biggest book series in the world right now and has been for quite a long time. It has something like 28 entries in the main series, along with several spin-offs and short stories and stuff. Lee Child is a busy man and we have made him incredibly rich. Each of the books is more or less self-contained from what I understand, and the story follows Jack Reacher. He's a former army policeman who wanders around the United States and he just happens to stumble into vast conspiracies and uncovers crimes and solves crimes and helps people out while he's doing it, and also he gets into a lot of fights. If you're not familiar with the Jack Reacher books, just ask your dad. He probably loves them. Now, a couple of years ago, it was finally adapted as an Amazon Prime TV show, and before that it was adapted into a couple of movies with Tom Cruise. And those are decent movies, but they're not what I'm talking about today. I'm talking about the Amazon Prime show, the second season of which is coming out soon, hashtag not sponsored. And I honestly, having read the first book, which is also what the first season of the television show is based on, it's called Killing Floor, I gotta say that Jack Reacher is much better as a TV show than as a book. And from this point forward, there's going to be a lot of spoilers. In fact, spoilers just for the whole first season of the show slash the whole first book, so just be aware of that. To put it in short, the show makes Reacher a better character. It paces the story a lot, a lot better. It makes it so we don't have to deal with the obnoxious prose of the book, because believe me, it is pretty bad at some points. And it also makes it feel like the other characters don't just revolve entirely around Reacher, you know, it makes it feel like they have their own lives and their own stories to tell. The only things I would say that the book does as good or better than the show are number one, Reacher's asshole-ish nature, let's say, and the action scenes. Now, Reacher being an asshole, he just is. Like, if you watch the show, yeah, he intimidates people, he starts fights when he doesn't really need to, he seems to care very little about a lot of their, you know, feelings and stuff, he mocks them, he talks down to them, he's kind of a dick. Whereas in the book, yeah, he does some of the same stuff, but number one, he comes across as a bit less, I don't know, eager to do violence. And number two, we can see his inner thoughts, so he comes across a bit better. You know, and also it does help that in both cases he usually only goes after people when they really deserve it, but still, he doesn't come across as the type of person that I would want to be friends with. And the action scenes, I would say, are done equally well in both the book and the show, but they are very, very different from one another. And basically in the book, the action scenes are more about planning and Reacher thinking about how he can get out of these situations and then just doing the smart thing to get out, whereas in the show, it's mostly about fighting. For example, in both the book and the show, there's a scene where he's in New York briefly, and some of the bad guys try to kidnap him or come after him in some way. And in the book, it's pretty obvious, like, two dudes come up, they have a gun hidden, and they tell him, hey, get in a car, and a car pulls up, and Reacher knows, okay, they're going to take me away somewhere and kill me, but they're in the middle of a crowded street, and he knows they're not going to shoot him, so he just says, no, I'm not doing it. And he calls their bluff, and they're not sure what to do. Whereas in the show, he lures the guy that's after him off into a deserted alley, and then they have a fight scene, and he kills him. And in both cases, I think it's really just adapting for the medium that they work in, you know, action scenes where it's just dudes fighting like that don't always work super well in text form. So the idea of Reacher planning and going after guys in a more cerebral way works a lot better, whereas in visual form, just have at it, you know, use your fight choreography, because that's one of the things that's really good about the show is the fight choreography. But now to stuff that the show pretty unambiguously does better. First up is Reacher, like, just as a character, he's a lot better. First, his demeanor and his size, his physical appearance and everything, that is spot on. Like, that is exactly in the show how it is in the books. In the show, he's played by Alan Richardson, who some of you might know as Thad from Blue Mountain State. But obviously, that most of you are going to know him as the guy from the second Hunger Games movie who gets killed by Katniss very quickly. You know, if I had a nickel for every time the main character in an Amazon Prime show was portrayed by an actor who got killed by Katniss in one of the Hunger Games movies, I would have two nickels. I don't know what to do with this information other than to share it. But Richardson's performance here is really, really good. And you can tell that Jack Reacher's size informs his personality, it informs his worldview and the way he approaches situations and approaches people. Like, people are kind of scared of him in the books, because not only is he a gigantic human being, but he's also got like a busted up face, you know. And Alan Richardson is also a gigantic human being. You know, he's what, like six foot three or six foot four? And I'm pretty sure they do camera tricks in the show to make him look even bigger. And he's just a giant slab of muscle. You know, like I really just want him to crush my head with his thighs. Wait, was that, did I say that out loud? And the fact that his size informs his personality and the way he treats people and the way others treat him is part of the reason why Tom Cruise didn't quite work as Jack Reacher in the movies that came out a while ago. And this video isn't really about those, but you know, Tom Cruise is a very good actor, whatever his other flaws. So he got the personality and attitude downright, but just the way he approached situations and the way other people treated him, it was still kind of like he was this big monster of a human, whereas he really wasn't. And so it just made this kind of disconnect, which didn't quite work. And the show still has that problem to a lesser extent, because while Richardson is still a really big dude, and you can understand people being intimidated by him, he's also, again, Jack Reacher in the book has kind of like a busted up face and everything. And Alan Richardson is still, he's too handsome. You know, he's too much of a pretty boy, and I wanted to step on me. Wait, no. He's too handsome. He's too much of a pretty boy. So he just doesn't quite work in that way, but it is still leaps and bounds beyond Tom Cruise. He also comes across as more of a human in the show. You know, in the book, he seems like this all knowing, nearly omniscient, just, I don't want to say machine, but he kind of seems like that at times, which is actually a very big problem in a lot of thriller novels, because they're just a little too blatant with the wish fulfillment, but whatever, that's a separate discussion. Like, Reacher just comes across as a little too perfect in the books, whereas in the show, he still comes across as a Superman-esque character, you know, somebody who's really good at everything, but he doesn't know everything. And you can tell he has an inner world. And I think that he's being portrayed as autistic. Like, it's kind of annoying to me how nowadays, anytime any character in fiction acts kind of weird, everyone immediately jumps to, ah, clearly they're autistic. But in Reacher's case, yeah, he does come across that way. Like, he has just a lot of weird knowledge that other people wouldn't have. And he's very good at connecting dots that others wouldn't be able to. Like, he just comes across that way, but I don't believe they ever say it in the show or the books. However, sometimes in the show, he is still a little too smart and a little too all-knowing, you know, like it almost approaches BBC Sherlock territory. Why is that so hard for me to say? I did like four takes. I'm not, I'm not doing another one. It doesn't matter. But like, for example, there's a scene where he fights these two hitmen who come after him. And he kills both of them. And then later, when he's talking to others, he mentions that they were South American ex-military. And they say, well, how did you know that? And he said, well, one of them used a headbutt on him. And that was a specific headbutt from a specific martial art, which is pretty much only ever used by South American militaries. And look, man, martial arts aren't that distinct from one another usually. You got to give us something better than that, writers. For example, the guys that are attacking him are from Venezuela originally. So what if he just heard them talking in Spanish for a minute, and he recognized their accents as Venezuelan, you know, that would give him the same information without making him look all-knowing, you know, and there's just a couple moments like that. But for the most part, they're really not that bad. Second problem that the show avoids from the books is the obnoxious prose because, oh my God, like, I would say around 80% of the time the prose in the book is perfectly fine. And I would imagine, because again, the book I read is the first one, I would imagine the later ones probably get a lot better, because, you know, again, Lee Child is pumping a lot of these out. He would improve his craft at some point. But still, at least in the first book, it is not good. You know, it's really obnoxious and annoying at times. Like, for example, it just takes way, way too long to say anything at a lot of points. And again, like I said, 80% of the time it's okay. The last 20% really sinks the ship, though. Because, for example, there's a scene early on in the book where Reacher goes to a barber in the small town that he visits, and he's getting a shave, and he just mentions, how do you guys stay in business? It doesn't seem like you have any customers. And the guy says, oh, well, the Kleiner Foundation, which Kleiner being the villain of the book, basically sets up this foundation and pays people off to keep them quiet. And this is when Reacher realizes that, because the barber mentions that the Kleiner Foundation pays every business in town $1,000 a week just to exist. And we also find out later, like, oh, okay, he's trying to keep them quiet and prevent any attention from coming to his criminal activities. But then later, Reacher is recounting this to somebody else. And again, the audience already knows this. So you could have just done this in one sentence, like, Reacher could just say, I explained the whole situation with the barber earlier, you know, something like that, okay, it doesn't have to be fancy. It could just be that or it could be a couple lines of dialogue. Instead, it spends like an entire page with Reacher trying to recall in his head exactly how it went, and then trying to say it in exactly the same way that the barber said it. And I'm like, bro, we don't need all this. The number three thing that the show did substantially better than the book is pacing. The first season of the show is split into eight episodes. So it's split into eight short, easily digestible chunks, each of which has new information and some progress made in the story. And obviously, you can like watch one or two episodes at a time and then come back later or watch them all at once. Like, people online like to joke about how, oh, I would binge watch eight episodes of a TV show, but I would never watch an eight hour movie. What's up with that is pacing. Like it's pacing guys, like TV shows are split into smaller chunks. So it feels like stuff is always moving and it feels like even if you stop in the middle, you have made some progress. Whereas movies are, I mean, okay, obviously movies are still split into sections, but it's not nearly as obvious. The book isn't what I would call slow paced, but there are points where it just takes way, way too long for the pertinent information to come to the forefront. And it just goes into far too much detail about everything that happens. For example, the story starts off with Richard arriving in this new town, Margrave, Georgia, and immediately being arrested for murder upon his arrival. And then he spends a weekend in jail, and then he gets out, and then he finds out that one of the people who was murdered was his brother. So he decides to stick around and help with the investigation and thus the rest of the story unfolds. That's how both the book and the show unfold. But in the show, that's the, that's the first episode. You know, again, that's one eighth of the story. Whereas in the book, it takes around one third of the way through to get to this point. And it's not a super long book, but it is longer than it needs to be for this sort of story. And so it drags quite a bit before you get to that point. And for this closure, I did watch the show before I read the book. And honestly, when I got to that point where I realized, okay, we're a third of the way through. And just now is the story really getting started. That's when I realized like, okay, I don't think this is going to be as good as the show was it. And I'll say right now, I think that Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher book is good. I just don't think it's as good as the show. And I don't think it's amazing by any stretch. And the number four thing that the show did substantially better than the book is that other characters feel like they have their own lives. You know, they don't feel like props that are moving around the hero, they feel like real people. Like, because the book is told in first person perspective, we are only ever with Reacher. And if anything important happens off screen, we're just hearing about it after the fact. Whereas in the show, it cuts away to other characters, you know, we see Detective Finley investigating some stuff on his own. We see other characters while they're being held hostage near the climax. We see some flashbacks to Reacher and his brother when they were children. Whereas in the book, we mostly just hear, yeah, I loved my brother. And I don't think that's a bad writing necessarily. Like when he finds out his brother died, we do sympathize with him. And we do hope that he finds this killer and everything we don't need a whole expanded elaborate backstory to explain why he loves his brother. But it is still nice to show, okay, here's the two of them together. So we really get a bit more attached to both Joe and Jack. And also, it displays some of Reacher's worldview and how he got became the person that he is today. So yeah, the Amazon Prime show, Reacher is a lot better than the Jack Reacher books or at least the first one. And at the end of the day, thriller novels are really just trying to emulate the cinematic and thrilling nature of action movies, you know, like they're trying to capture that same feeling and get that same dynamic, I suppose would be the best way of putting it. So it makes total sense that this thing would be better in a visual medium because the type of story being told, the type of characters being used in that story really are designed for visual medium. But it still works out pretty well as a book. So I think if you like thrillers, I mean, but you probably have already read the Jack Reacher books, if you like thrillers, but I would say give him a shot, you know, killing Floor at the very least is a lot of fun. The central mystery and finding out what's going on with the counterfeiting ring is a lot of fun, finding out about Reacher's brother and his death is a lot of fun. Like it's, it's good. Okay. And I would say the same thing about the movies that came out a while ago and the show. All of these are great thrillers. So if you're into thrillers, maybe check out Jack Reacher in any of the forms that you can consume Jack Reacher content. And that's about all. Thanks for watching. Goodbye. Hello, huge thanks to all of my patrons. You see these names here? Yeah, these are my patrons. Their names are very cool. You should sit here and read all of them, especially a thanks to all of my $10 up patrons who are all of you. You're, you're all amazing. I swear all of you, you're, you're great. And if you watched until this point, well, you're even more amazinger. So yeah, see you later. Goodbye. Like the video, comment on it, subscribe, consider donating Patreon. What, why am I still talking?