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Streaming series committed to storytelling

Amazon Prime and Netflix recently released two eight-part direct-to-streaming miniseries whose respective target audiences are far apart, but whose commitment to their genre formulas of storytelling are equally impeccable.

'Reacher' on Amazon

If you've ever read one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, you're old enough to remember when airplane trips didn't include the luxury of entertaining yourself with portable electronic devices during flight.

For you youngsters out there, a subspecies of paperback page-turners existed solely to be plowed through in roughly two hours, just as my sadly departed Aunt Barb made her extended cross-country car trips bearable by stocking up on Dick Francis audio mystery novels.

Jack Reacher was not really a character so much as an archetype, a male power fantasy of a nigh-infallible military-trained drifter who randomly wandered through a succession of quietly crooked small towns, uncovering larger criminal conspiracies and letting his fists do his talking.

If you've ever been a fan of Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne or of Batman or Wolverine from DC and Marvel Comics, you don't need me to explain the appeal of a man of few words who knows how to knock heads together and is so bereft of remaining emotional connections that he has almost no vulnerabilities left for his enemies to exploit.

While Tom Cruise was cast as Jack Reacher in 2012 and 2016, he lacked more than merely height in filling out the towering vigilante, but the absolutely massive Alan Ritchson, who makes most ordinary humans look like hobbits, comes to the role well-honed by stints in "Smallville," "The Hunger Games," "Hawaii Five-0" and "Titans."

As noncostumed quasi-Captains America go, Ritchson is more Reb Brown in 1979 than Chris Evans in the MCU, with the same absence of introspection, unflinchingly vicious instincts and easy charisma as a law enforcement K-9, which is to say, he's perfectly cast as Jack Reacher.

Joining him on his jaunt through rural Georgia are Willa Fitzgerald as Roscoe Conklin, a young police officer who can shoot as well as any fella, while her femininity is underscored by her deliberately unflattering male name, and Malcolm Goodwin as Oscar Finlay, chief detective of the fictional Southern small town where his race and his refusal to play ball with corrupt city officials have made him a pariah.

In stories like Reacher's, you need a formidable gal who can be won over by our lumbering hunk's authenticity and a finicky authority figure who initially chafes at our unaccountable outsider's recklessness, even as they ultimately team up and develop a mutual respect by defeating their foes together.

A word of warning - don't be eating anything when Reacher and friends arrive at the murder scene of the town's police captain in the series' second episode, and I say this as someone unfazed by most of the carnage on AMC's "The Walking Dead."

Otherwise, the violence is as wholesome as "The A-Team" back in the '80s, and "Reacher" as a whole has the same solid meat-and-potatoes action appeal as a less-depraved version of John Ringo's "Paladin of Shadows" series.

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window on Netflix

Considering how much he built his comic persona on frat-bro humor in "Saturday Night Live," it's perhaps not surprising that so many people still sleep on the canny insights of Will Ferrell, who teamed with fellow SNL alum Kristen Wiig in 2015 to produce and star in "A Deadly Adoption," a straight-faced satire of made-for-Lifetime TV-movies that aired on the Lifetime Network.

I was one of half a dozen humans on Earth who found that film entertaining, so I'll admit my judgment might be suspect, but I can't imagine anyone not laughing out loud at "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window," which Ferrell also produced, but which stars Kristen Bell of "Veronica Mars" and "The Good Place."

Bell has always demonstrated a subtle knack for combining smirky comedy with dramatic pathos in her roles, and as the titular "Woman in the House," she dutifully cycles through almost all of the Lifetime-standard tropes. As a materially pampered suburbanite who's taken to mixing her mental health prescriptions with heavy doses of day drinking because her marriage fell apart after her 8-year-old daughter died.

When a handsome young widower who's raising a 9-year-old daughter moves in across the street, Bell finds herself regaining her affinity for creating art, until she realizes the man has a girlfriend, whom Bell then believes she sees being murdered in the window of his home. However, police turn skeptical when they learn Bell has been washing down her medications with bottles of wine.

Nearly every plot convention and contrivance of Lifetime's signature "middle-aged white woman in peril" subgenre plays out in miniature here, from a "pin the tail on the murderer" round-robin rotation of ever-changing prime suspects, to the frame-job of a murder weapon covered in the sole witnesses' fingerprints, that leads to the indignity of her being wrongfully locked up, however briefly.

While this series engages in some inspired sight gags on the level of "Airplane!," to my mind the best feature of this production is how even its most absurd dialogue and scenarios are played with a molecule-thin single layer of irony by the cast, right down to how the handyman is continually repainting Bell's mailbox every time he appears at her house.

Just as it's not uncommon for Lifetime TV-movie heroines to become housebound by agoraphobia, Bell is paralyzed by ombrophobia, a fear of the rain.

The twist ending (with a special guest star whose identity I won't spoil) leaves room for a promising sequel, capable of covering all the tropes this first miniseries couldn't get to yet.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

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Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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