Alan Ritchson, Christopher Rodriguez Marquette and Sydelle Noel in Reacher season 4.
Courtesy of Prime Video
Reacher has been one of Prime Video’s most popular shows from the moment it premiered. It’s not hard to see why: Big guy who helps good people and kicks the crap out of bad people is a winning formula, and the show executes it well. That it’s based on a best-selling and long-running string of novels doesn’t hurt either.
Season 4 of Reacher, which premiered Aug. 12, didn’t have quite as big an opening week as the previous three, but that’s not really any cause for alarm. For a few reasons:
• Shows in their fourth season often show some signs of decline.
• The drop-off in this wasn’t that severe. Reacher’s 1.5 billion minutes of watch time was off by about 17 percent from the opening week of season 3 in February 2025 (1.81 billion). A little of the drop can probably be attributed to August generally being a lighter TV viewing time than February.
• Even with the dip from previous premiere weeks, Reacher still had its fifth best weekly viewing total ever.
• People coming to the show were very much coming for the new season. Nielsen’s streaming ratings measure every available episode of a show, but 79 percent of Reacher’s total for Aug. 10-16 was for the three new episodes that debuted Aug. 12. That’s about 1.19 billion minutes, which would have led the week on its own. Since Reacher’s seasons are largely self-contained, it makes sense that viewers wouldn’t feel the need to do a ton of catch-up viewing.
So yes, it was down a little to start its fourth season, but Reacher is still doing big business for Prime Video. Season 5 is already filming, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Prime extends it another season or two beyond that.
Here are the weekly Nielsen charts for Aug. 10-16.