Reacher (Alan Ritchson) and Neagley (Maria Sten) take in a Cubs game in Neagley.
Photo by Sandy Morris/Prime Video
As, at best, a casual observer of Reacher, I had an idea that the Frances Neagley character was pretty well-liked among fans — obviously enough to anchor a spinoff. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it make the Nielsen charts for its premiere week.
But No. 1 overall? Didn’t see that coming. But Neagley had a launch week just about as big as Reacher did back in 2022 — 1.78 billion minutes of watch time for the spinoff vs. 1.84 billion for the parent series. Both were binge releases of eight episodes, and their run times are within 11 minutes of one another, so the comparison is about as like to like as you can get.
That’s a great start, helped by some smart scheduling by Prime Video. Neagley premiered on the same day (Sept. 16) as Reacher’s season finale, so people finishing the latter could move right into the spinoff.
The funny thing is, though, as Matt Mitovich noted in his newsletter, Neagley was at one point intended to premiere before season 4 of Reacher — hence Jack’s (Alan Ritchson) line in the spinoff that he’s going to catch “an eastbound train” from Chicago. Season 4 of Reacher is set in Philadelphia.
Prime’s decision not to stick with that seems like very much the right call. Scheduling is mostly a lost art in the streaming era, but maybe as streamers continue to (re)discover the idea of making and releasing shows on a regular cadence, they’ll also (re)learn that there are ways to position them for the best chance at success too.
The streaming top 10s in the United States for Sept. 14-20 are below. As a reminder, for HBO shows that stream simultaneously on HBO Max — Lanterns, in this case — I include them as originals even though Nielsen doesn’t.