When the news broke that the James Bond franchise would no longer be controlled by EON and the Broccoli family—the family-owned production company that has helmed the movie franchise for over sixty years—the knee-jerk response from Bond traditionalists like me was: "Oh no, now there's going to be a bunch of streaming 007 TV shows."
But lately, there's another Amazon series centered on a kick-ass male hero that has me rethinking that concern. Because if Bond fans are looking for a test case as to what a James Bond Amazon Prime Video show might look like, Reacher is a damn good example of how to do it right.
The character of Jack Reacher has been called an "American James Bond" more than once. Incumbent Reacher actor Alan Ritchson has said it, the comparison has shown up on blurbs on Lee Child's novels, and Child himself, despite being British, has also said that he thinks the Amazon takeover could be good for the Bond franchise because he feels that "the concept is dated and it needs a shake-up."
If you look outside the films, the Bond mythos has been updated in the world books, at least, in the last 20 years. William Boyd's 2013 Bond novel Solo had Bond coming face to face with a changing world, while all three of Anthony Horowitz's Bond books (starting with Trigger Mortis in 2015) gave Bond more progressive allies, as well as even more interiority than was offered by Ian Fleming. Finally, in the last three years, Kim Sherwood's Double-0 novels have given us a taste of what a 21st-century TV series about various Bond-esque agents could look like, set firmly in the Bond universe.
Why bring about contemporary Bond books when thinking about a new Amazon Prime Video series? Well, just like Reacher, there's actually great James Bond material out there, that hasn't been adapted at all. One of the strengths of Reacher is the way showrunner Nick Santora stays fairly faithful to the books but mixes things up to surprise even longtime fans, or, to avoid outdated tropes.
Child may have a point that the original Fleming novels might be outdated, but there's a wealth of much more contemporary material that could be adapted, Reacher-style, to make at least one streaming Bond or Bond-adjacent TV series. Again, Sherwood's books are basically screaming to be made into a TV series, since the novels follow numerous Double-O agents, including characters Johanna Harwood (003), Joseph Dryden (004), and Sid Bashir (009). And in the second book, you've got Conrad Harthrop-Vane, 000, who is more like a traditional Bond character, with a bit of a twist.
Related: How to Read the Jack Reacher Books in the Correct Order (Hint: It's Not What You Think)
On top of all that, the Double-O books rest on the idea that James Bond himself is missing, and the other agents are dealing with that fallout, as well as their own missions. If a series like this was given the Reacher treatment, we could follow one of the agents each season, or have overlapping stories, kind of like what we're seeing in Reacher Season 3, in which Neagley (Maria Sten) is popping into the story, but also headed into her own spinoff show.
Sherwood herself is very keen on the idea of her Double-O books becoming a show, saying in 2024: "It's really fun to be able to say Bond can still be Bond, but I can bring in these new main characters who hopefully kind of widen out the world and bring more people into it."
And, even if for some reason Amazon did want to try a Bond-universe show just focused on Bond himself, Reacher once again provides a blueprint for how that could work. Like the Child novels, the reason why the Reacher show is so satisfying is that the seasons are all slow-burns. In truth, this is also what good Bond novels are like too; things start quotidian and intriguing, and eventually boil over into bigger finales. In a sense, few of the Bond films have actually captured the smaller, simmering quality of Bond novels—whether written in 1954 or 2024.
Reacher has also proven that an action-adventure show centered around one guy getting s--t done can also be a massive crossover hit with a huge audience. The most recent season of Reacher has 54.6 million viewers as of right now, and that's likely going to grow. What kind of massive audience could a Bond show command? Double that? Triple?
If an Amazon Prime Video James Bond series did happen, it could make 007 into a water cooler type of franchise, rather than a big, blockbuster franchise. And maybe, just maybe, there's a world where that wouldn't be so bad.
Related: James Bond Fans Call For Florence Pugh to Play Iconic Character
from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/sMi9gof
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