3 out of 5

Created by: Nick Santora and Nicholas Wootton

covers season 1

Spinning off from Reacher, Neagley stars Maria Sten as the titular P.I., off on her own case in Chicago while – after a guest appearance in the first episode – Alan Ritchson continues on the fourth season of his own show.

While Sten absolutely owns her scenes, and adds an incredible amount of depth to her character inbetween the provided lines of dialogue, Neagley inevitably suffers from things that afflict many spin-offs: the show is a gamble, and thus has to go at things with a lower budget, and juggle its own tone versus that of its parent series. It also doesn’t have the benefit of a source Lee Child book; while our series writers are shared with Reacher and certainly skilled at spinning up an eight-episode TV yarn, the story is clunky – and made clunkier due to the above-mentioned juggle – and fights for space while building out Francis Neagley and her costars, including Greyston Holt as a Chicago cop named Hudson with whom Neagley teams up, Jasper Jones as a street kid named Keno who serves a similar purpose from a different perspective, and fellow P.I. in training Renee, played by Adeline Rudolph.

The clunk mainly manifest in bad guy overload: crooked cops and evil businessmen are a dime a dozen, while the pitch behind main baddie Lawrence Cole, played by the ever-enigmatic Damon Herriman, comes across like a conceptual joke for which the punchline was never written – Lawrence, is, essentially, a cult leader, done up in full 70s garb and regalia, and yet the story never quite justifies the Why of that or how / why the cult “works” for its members, beyond that we just kind of know the basic shape of cults, and right, they normally have a dude in jean jackets who listens to Norman Greenbaum at the head. Like, it’s definitely a joke, but again, the writers don’t really see it through – and similarly, leaps are made to connect Neagley, emotionally, to Hudson, trying to shortcut via what we know about the character from Reacher to create some automatic bonds.

These are valid ways for a TV show to dance around plot points (it’s a shorthand “language” we TV viewers speak effectively), it just shows up too bluntly in Neagley.

Then again, because we do have crew from Reacher, and the pitch here was for something a bit more street-based and less fisticuffed than that show, and because – reunderlining – Sten sells this all so well, the show is very, very bingeable, and besides some questionable AI / CG in the opening scene, it smartly spreads out its budget and stunt work to pepper each episode with some satisfying clue hunting, running, punching, and scenes that show the writers and actors can provide emotional depth, just, hopefully, future seasons won’t feel as beholden to making sure we know we’re watching a Reacher-verse show and Neagley can grow into its own identity.