Amazon Prime Video’s new No. 1 show looks to copy Reacher’s success

On By Littum

Amazon Prime Video has certainly acquired the rights to a lot of good book source material, and it turns out they’ve had an Alex Cross series coming up, the prolific hero written by James Patterson across 32 books and counting. Here it’s just called “Cross.”

While Detective Alex Cross has been played in films twice by Morgan Freeman and once by Tyler Perry, it is now Aldis Hodge who takes up the mantle. He’s a SAG-winning actor who was recently one of the only good parts of DC’s Black Adam playing Hawkeye. Now he has this high-profile part.

Cross dropped all eight episodes of its first season this past week and has been planted as the No. 1 series on the service since then, making long-running viewings of The The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It is very clear that Amazon is trying to create another Reacher-type success on the service, an adaptation of a big, crime-solving hero from popular novels that has essentially unlimited source material to draw on.

Is Cross actually good? It’s decent, it seems. The critic score is 76% and the audience score is 72%. If we want to compare it with Reacherit’s not going so well. Season 1 of that show had a 92%/91% critic audience split. Season 2 had a score of 98%/78%, which seems a little crazy to me since that season was not good. But I guess I’m the minority critical opinion there. At least no, Cross doesn’t do quite as well, but if it gets the ratings, a slightly lower review score won’t matter. And in fact, the show was greenlit for Season 2 before Season 1 even aired, so it’s clear that Amazon has some big plans for it. It helps that shows like this are relatively inexpensive compared to the sprawling budgets of other Amazon series.

It feels like a show that will likely do well in the long run. I’ve read a dozen Alex Cross books over the years, and I definitely like the character enough to check out this series when I get a moment. I mean, the books aren’t exactly completely life-changing or anything, so a pretty good show adapting a pretty good series is all you can really hope for. And I like Aldis Hodge in everything I’ve seen him in and I expect him to do a good job here as well.

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