JuicyTalk
Reacher has officially become so big that other shows are making fun of it – and the authors of the series have a surprising take on The Boys‘ dig at their series!
Reacher, one of Prime Video’s most popular series, aired the Season 4 finale on September 16th, but the character isn’t going to be gone long. Reacher is returning this month – not the on-screen version, but the original book series, as the 31st installment, Chain Reaction, releases Oct 20th. (Season 5 of the show is set to premiere in 2027.)
While Reacher has an unknown number of future seasons to come (potentially enough to rival Grey’s Anatomy, if Prime chooses to adapt every book in the series!), The Boys wrapped up with a 5th and final season in May of this year – and went out with the usual number of filthy jokes and digs at everything from comic books to politics – including Reacher.
In the first episode of the final season, The Boys saw The Worm, a former Supe, writing a script for Reacher. It starts with the description “Reacher, MASSIVE, enters the motel.“, and a brief scene of dialogue, where a woman comments on how huge he is, before this version of Reacher replies “You know what they say about huge guys… they have huge c**ks!”.
The joke is undeniably crass, but that’s what The Boys is known for… and it’s not entirely without substance. Reacher is known for his size (Alan Ritchson, the star of the series, is 6’2″ tall, and around 230lbs), and each season, he meets a female character who is likely to end up in bed with him.
Lee Child’s Response May Surprise You
Speaking to Screen Rant, Lee Child and co-author Andrew Child made it clear that far from being upset at the joke, they are just happy that Reacher has become such a huge (pun intended) success that the character is appearing outside of the show:
Lee Child: I’m always happy. Any mention whatsoever is always good.
I mean, seriously, that is the thing you hope for that, first of all, you write a book and some people buy it, and then it becomes a well-known book series. And then at some other, later, point, which for Reacher was probably about eight or ten years into the book series, he then migrates outward into the general culture. I just love that, that people know who he is and would want to make a joke about him. That’s fantastic.
Child also brought up that it’s not the first time Reacher has escaped containment in this way:
The New Zealand Parliament has an official record of all the proceedings there and a minister was introducing some big new policy and he said, “like Jack Reacher, we need to, to hope for the best but plan for the worst”. And that is the mark of success, that he’s no longer trapped in the world of books. He now belongs everywhere.
Not Everyone Has Such A Gracious Response To A The Boys Joke
Over the course of the series, The Boys has parodied multiple major figures – everyone from the President of the United States to
Kendall Jenner, and while most simply ignore the jokes, Elon Musk had a very public negative reaction to the Prime series taking a swing at him.
‘The Disruptor’ appears in the series finale, a tech-bro billionaire obsessed with space travel, sporting a pro-Homelander baseball cap. It doesn’t take much to see the resemblance to Musk, and the character ends up killed in orbit by Homelander. As far as The Boys goes, it was a relatively tame inclusion, but Musk took to social media to rage against the final episode, calling it “pathetic” and then going on to say that he was “not upset” but that the ending “sounds fake and gay”.
Creator Kripke, meanwhile, was thrilled at the response, saying “I’ll never get a better review ever”. Clearly, whether the targets of his satire love or hate their inclusion on the show, Kripke is just happy to get a reaction out of them!
Reacher
- Release Date
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February 3, 2022
- Network
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Prime Video
- Showrunner
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Nick Santora
- Directors
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Omar Madha, Carol Banker, Julian Holmes, Lin Oeding, M.J. Bassett, Norberto Barba, Stephen Surjik, Thomas Vincent
