When Amazon Prime announced it would stream a series based on the Jack Reacher novels, many were wary. Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, which is full of people who would hate Jack Reacher. Surely they’d ruin it. Whoopi Goldberg IS Jane Reacher!

But that would alienate the target market: men who like books about very big men who don’t say a lot, have a backstory that includes “Special Forces Astronaut,” and are smarter than all those puffed-up martinets who think a degree from Harvard makes them suited to run an unfolding investigation into why an 82-year-old man was found upside down in a well with Iraqi dinars stuffed in his pants. Reacher knows, right away, with Sherlock-like perception:

“The dinars are post-Saddam, but series B, which had a 37 percent devaluation within the fiscal year and were offloaded to Bulgarian currency traders, who sold them on the South American market. He’s upside down, but his socks are around his ankles, which means they had poor elastic, typical of Bulgarian socks. He was killed before he was put in the well, as you can tell by his eyelashes.”

“What’s the matter with his eyelashes, Reacher?”

(Beat.) “Nothing. That’s the point.”

The pleasure is hearing these brusque and no doubt correct observations come out of a guy nine feet tall and eight feet wide, who also knows 37 ways to kill someone with a rubber band.

There were movie versions of Reacher, starring Tom Cruise. Fans were dismayed, because Cruise — well, let’s just say it’s like casting Robert Reich to star in The Larry Bird Story. But the first movie had the classic moment of the genre: Our hero, who is just passing through, is minding his own business in a diner. Some yahoos come up and start taunting him. The audience knows that soon all yahoos will be profusely bleeding from multiple apertures and facing years of expensive kneecap-reconstruction surgery. But we have to observe the time-honored rules. First, the yahoos have to taunt the outsider.

Main Yahoo: “You got a problem, mister?”

Reacher, staring down at his coffee, smiling with slight regret: “No.”

Yahoo: “Boys, it looks like he’s disagreein’ with me!”

Boys: (Dumb chuckles.)

Yahoo: “Mister, we don’t take kindly to strangers ’round these parts. Mebbe you’d best finish your ap’pl pah there and mosey on off. Mebbe me an’ the boys could finish it for you. I see you got it à la mode.”

Boys: (Hoots of derision because French has been spoken.)

Reacher: “It’s not apple. It’s chokeberry.”

Yahoo: “Well pardon me fir not bein’ a berry expert such as y’sef, but (flicks switchblade) I never hearda no chokeberry.”

Reacher: “I can help you with that.”

He grabs yahoo’s throat with one hand, knocks the knife out with the other, stands, kicks yahoo no. 2 in the knee, spins, uses right elbow to smash yahoo no. 3’s nose, head-butts yahoo no. 1. All are down and groaning; jukebox is playing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” Reacher walks out of diner, then returns, puts down a $20 bill, and looks at the waitress, who wants to sleep with him right now, and says, “Friends of yours?” She shakes her head no. He says “Good,” and he nods, which says it all. Reacher, man.

The Amazon version is fun. It is so black-and-white it makes an Ingmar Bergman movie look like the moment when post-twister Dorothy opens the door to behold the world of Oz. It’s such a cartoon you almost expect a leering criminal to sneer, “It’s wabbit season, Weacher,” whereupon Jack rips off a sign to reveal the words “Duck Season.” I enjoyed it all.

But. The series has been renewed, and this might not be a good thing. The longer an action-hero series runs, the more it drifts woke. Remember 24? It was a show about a secret agent who cannot eat, drink, sleep, or move his bowels for 24 hours because he has to stop a plot to kill the president and blow up a city. Jack Bauer was the hero, and he was just what we wanted in the post-9/11 era.

“Chloe, you have to get me access to the security-camera footage right now,” he’d shout into his phone while garroting a jihadist. She would say she needed approval. “We’re running out of time,” Jack would shout, which blew away all institutional barriers. FISA warrants? Comin’ right up. Just what we wanted: a man who was a patriot, insanely skilled, connected to a super-competent intelligence agency that had data on everyone but used it only for Good. It was a hit.

Over the years, though, it drifted. Within a few seasons the plot would be something like “Callow Nixonian president is aligned with Russia to blow up an aircraft carrier so a military industrialist (Jon Voight) can make more money and blame it all on Muslims.” The show became an exercise in national masochism, turning in on itself to demonstrate how we were the real enemy. When it was revived years later, it flopped fast — perhaps because people remembered how this was going to end. Boo, America.

Let us hope this doesn’t happen with Reacher. You get the sense that if it did, Reacher himself would pay a visit to the scriptwriters. I mean, he punches a guy who mistreats a dog, and that wasn’t even a major subplot.