Reacher‘s third season finished filming earlier this summer with leading man Alan Ritchson heading into hiatus with various projects including a revenge-motivated disco-rock movie, but Amazon knows a hit franchise when they feel one. The enormously successful Dad TV show also made an important break from Lee Child’s books by moving slightly past Jack Reacher being the only character who will appear in each chapter.
That is to say, Frances Neagley will join Reacher in come capacity each season, beginning with the first season, based upon The Killing Floor, in which Maria Sten’s character made a brief appearance although she does not appear in that book. This also helped the flow between seasons when Neagley sent up an ATM-fueled flare to call Reacher into action in the Bad Luck and Trouble-adapting second chapter of the Prime Video series. Amazon hasn’t revealed how much of Neagley that we will see in the third season, which will be based upon the Persuader novel. We do know, however, that Reacher will fight somebody bigger than him, and we can speculate that Neagley will save Reacher’s ass on the planning front.
Amazon has naturally begun to mull over Reacher spin offs, and whaddya know, guess whose name came up?
Plot
Deadline scored the initial word on this spin off, which is being fast tracked:
Prime Video is looking to turn another flagship drama series into a franchise. A spinoff from Reacher is on fast-track development at the streamer and poised for a greenlight, sources tell Deadline.
Titled Neagley, I hear the offshoot would center on Maria Sten’s fan favorite character Frances Neagley, a corporate security professional and former military colleague of Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) in the Army’s 110th Special Investigations Unit. Ritchson is set to appear on the spinoff as a guest star, reprising his role as Reacher, sources said.
This week, Prime/Video Amazon made that announcement official.
What would a Neagly series be about? Probably rocket launchers and grenades. In all seriousness, though, the sky would be the limit for Neagley’s security-based adventures, and it’s easy to imagine her investigating heavy-duty, federally-prosecuted, white collar crimes. And Maria Sten’s charisma is well known to Reacher viewers after Frances Neagley went into regular cast mode in the second season of Reacher, where she originated as a member of Reacher’s military police unit, i.e. the “Special Investigators”:
She emerged in the present day as a Reacher sidekick, so that he’s not a lone wolf (at least not totally) in the series, and damn, I gotta admit that it’s nice to see a female central to this series who will also never be a fleeting Reacher love interest. Readers will know this especially due to Child’s Night School novel, in which Reacher mentions that Neagley’s aversion to touch is actually rooted in haptephobia, meaning that she actually fears being touched by others. We do know, however, that she very much loves to give Reacher a hard time, always knows what to order for him in a restaurant, and if she had it her way, she would eat cereal for nearly every meal.
Cast
Thus far, the only rumored cast member would be Maria Sten as Francis Neagley, but we could probably assume that Alan Ritchson would at least make an appearance as Reacher to get the show started off right. Is it too much to hope that the TV gods would remember how much viewers enjoyed Willa Fitzgerald’s Roscoe Conklin and give her a cameo, too? Perhaps.
Release Date
Reacher‘s third season arrives sometime in 2025, and if Neagley’s show comes together, Amazon would likely put this spin off on a rotating schedule, so 2026 sounds likely.
Trailer
In the absence of cameras rolling on a spin off, here’s a look back at Neagley’s cereal obsession taking root in Reacher‘s first season.