Amazon Prime Video’s New #1 Show Is Just Bizarre At This Point

Amazon Prime Video has a slate of pretty solid original offerings these days, but looking at the top 10 list, I do not understand how one of its shows is performing this well, and doing things that really no show on any streaming service I’ve seen has done.

Right now, Reacher is the #1 show on Amazon Prime Video. That may not be the biggest surprise given that it’s obviously popular. But the context of how popular? Popular enough where Reacher is currently the #1 show a full month and a half after season 3 ended, and slid down the list eventually before this inexplicable resurgence.

This means Reacher is higher than newer shows like The Bondsman, Wheel of Time season 3, recent The Summer I Turned Pretty rewatches ahead of the new, final season and the new hit series Etoile which was #1 for a long while until suddenly, it’s #5 and Reacher is bak on top.

Reacher is a series that performs unlike any other streaming original I’ve ever seen. It’s not just this recent, weeks-later surge to #1. You can track Amazon’s top 10 list over the course of an entire year and you will almost see Reacher somewhere in the list no matter how long it’s been since the last season. And in this last case, it was about 15 months between season 2 and 3.

The numbers all back it up. Reacher got a record 54.6 million views for the return of season 3 in its first three weeks, the most-watched returning season of a show ever, and past even Fallout superb season 1 performance. I don’t know what it does over a full year when it’s obviously still being heavily watched, but it has to be massive.

The show is just so widely appealing and accessible it doesn’t matter that it’s far from perfect. Large attractive man solves crimes and fights people based on a series of popular books can hit about every quadrant you can imagine, and it has. Amazon has to be positively giddy about Reacher as a series given that it’s relatively cheap to produce, does not need enormous gaps between seasons, has practically infinite source material to adapt and puts up the biggest views on the network (it didn’t surpass The Rings of Power premiere, but with that show losing half its audience for season 2, it’s certainly outperforming it now). Now, they’re even doing a spin-off because why not.

I’m telling you, as someone who tracks the performance of streaming shows across every service, and has been doing this for years, Reacher is in a category all its own, and this recent resurgence to #1 exemplifies that perfectly.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.