During the long, strange press tour for Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts movie, the comedian has grumbled extensively about how things just aren’t how they used to be. In the latest instance, he told journalist Bari Weiss on her Honestly podcast, “I miss a dominant masculinity. I get the toxic thing . . . but still, I like a real man.” If Seinfeld truly does miss what his 70-year-old brethren might consider real men, I have some good news: Amazon Prime is teeming with them.
Although a release date has not yet been announced, Prime recently dropped the first trailer for a new series based on James Patterson’s novels about detective Alex Cross. It features hulking, hunky actor Aldis Hodge, alternately shirtless and tuxedoed, as he cracks cases and breaks hearts. Hodge’s Cross is just the latest dominantly masculine hero to jump on the streaming service directly from the page. Whenever Cross premieres, it will join a rugged roster that includes Bosch, Jack Ryan, The Terminal List, and Reacher. With shows like these, Amazon appears hell-bent on a mission to flood the zone with content based on Airport Books for Dads. And considering that Cross has already been renewed for a second season ahead of its premiere, this trend shows no signs of stopping—like a dad who refuses to ask for directions.
Each of the shows preceding Cross has its own distinct rhythms and quirks, but they all have more in common than just a target demographic. They are resolutely uncool throwback thrillers about male protagonists, either from a military or detective background, who play by their own rules in order to do what’s right.
First came Bosch, based on Michael Connelly’s long-running series of L.A.-set novels about hard-nosed detective Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver). Premiering in 2014, it was one of Amazon’s earliest efforts at original programming, and it ended up running for seven seasons. Next came Jack Ryan, the John Krasinski-led take on Tom Clancy’s signature CIA analyst, who has been rebooted in movies almost as many times as Batman. A few years later, Amazon doubled down, adding both The Terminal List—based on former Navy SEAL Jack Carr’s novels about Navy SEAL James Reece (Chris Pratt), which the author has been cranking out with SEAL-like book-a-year relentlessness since 2018—and Reacher, adapted from Lee Child’s series, which follows enormous, nomadic, ex-military rabble rouser Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson). These shows are fine-tuned delivery systems for action, intrigue, and, at least in the case of Reacher, bravura ass-kicking from a man so large his wrists can’t be contained by conventional handcuffs.
What the shows also have in common is that they’re hits. After Reacher premiered in 2022, it became the first Prime show to top Nielsen’s weekly ranking of streaming original series. While Bosch never claimed quite as many viewers, it proved so popular that, after ending in 2021, Amazon shunted Welliver over to the Freevee series, Bosch: Legacy, a doubly renewed “spin-off” that’s really more of a sequel. (But a separate spin-off is also on the way, starring Maggie Q.) Before Jack Ryan ended with Season 4 last year, it was a reliable ratings-grabber, and The Terminal List has also been renewed for a second season, and is getting a prequel series. And though the New York Times makes a convincing case that women are very much into Reacher too, it’s clear from the 58% and 56% male audiences for Reacher and Jack Ryan, respectively—and the two-thirds age 50-plus viewership of both—that dads can’t get enough of these shows.
It doesn’t take a Bosch-like detective to figure out why. These shows are familiar, uncomplicated, and just predictable enough—even in their twistiness. They offer the vicarious thrill of unflappable male protagonists who take zero in the way of crap from any authority, and simply can’t stop attracting younger women. They also offer an old school sensibility, common among men who thirst for a different era. As Welliver described the character of Bosch in the show’s first season: “He is kind of out of step with things. He doesn’t know what Hulu is. He still carries a flip phone. He’s a lover of jazz. He listens to vinyl, and he listens to the radio.” Shows like Bosch reflect back to graying male viewers both the men they think they are and the men they fantasize about being.
Amazon’s Airport Books for Dads genre also validates a worldview held by all dads of throwback stripes: that governments are all run by crooks and nincompoops, and nobody in charge has any idea what the hell they’re doing anymore. Jacks Ryan and Reacher both love their country but can’t stand the corrupt bureaucrats conspiring to diminish America’s inherent greatness. No matter where any dad happens to fall on the political spectrum, he can likely get behind that perspective. Dads also tend to value competence in the extreme. Tom Hanks officially became America’s Dad in part because his characters are competence-embodied—you can’t help but believe they will fix whatever needs fixing, be it World War II, precision lunar landings, or an airplane with an engine full of dead geese. In an era of chaos and buffoonery, Amazon Prime boasts a rogue’s gallery of straight shooters who always hit their targets.
The reasons these shows appeal to Amazon are just as obvious as why they appeal to Dads. The episodic nature of these long-running book series lends itself to serialized storytelling rather than movies. Before Reacher was a streaming hit, the character flopped at the box office, even with Tom Cruise in the lead. (Well, perhaps especially with Cruise in the lead—nobody found him large enough to fill Reacher’s colossal shoes.) And while Jack Ryan ran for four seasons, pulling plotlines from various Tom Clancy books, Prime’s film adaptation of Clancy’s Without Remorse, starring Michael B. Jordan, failed to ignite with viewers. In fact, Prime outright cited the vast backlog of Alex Cross material in justifying its firm commitment to the upcoming show, claiming at its recent upfronts: “With over 30 novels written by Patterson featuring Alex Cross as his main protagonist, it was an easy choice to bring Cross back for a second season.”
Not to mention that new fans of Cross (or Ryan or Reacher, et al.) might linger around, post-finale, on a different part of the platform that famously started as a bookstore, in order to do some vertically integrated book-shopping.
While a lot of shows seem designed to appeal to either young audiences or absolutely everybody, Prime Video has decided to fly a Kiss the Cook apron as its flag. With its cash crop of action-packed shows based on popular books, the streaming service has become a homing beacon for a legion of Jerry Seinfelds—a highly coveted demo for so long, they seem to feel completely ignored now that they’re slightly less incessantly catered to. As long as dads keep tuning in, though, Amazon Prime will remain a dominant force in dominant masculinity.