Lone Wolf

Back when I was looking for clips from TV shows to screen in class, I came across a “behind the scenes” interview about the emergence of the Law & Order franchise. One of the producers said that the network noticed that audiences were shifting to the right, and they wanted to cater to that with a police-and-prosecution-focused show.

It’s interesting to compare that moment to the latest offerings on American streaming TV: Reacher on Amazon Prime and Tracker on CBS. Media outlets and blogs are rife with comparisons of the two heroes, but little has been said about how they fit the moment. Both series, based respectively on successful book series by Lee Child and Jeffrey Deaver, feature a lone wolf, aimless and homeless, “walking the Earth like Cain in Kung Fu.”

Jack Reacher is an ex-military-police investigator who, unwittingly, gets embroiled in criminal investigations. Brief example of his exploits:

Colter Shaw was raised by survivalist parents and puts his expertise to good use as a reward collector for missing people:

This trend is interesting, and in many ways flies in the face of both traditional narratives about law enforcement: the one that sees police officers as the good guys catching criminals, and the one flagging oppressions and abuses of power and calling to curtail law enforcement. Here we have private citizens who outclass and outperform the police; the police have qualms about cooperating with them, but benefit when they do. In one scene, an officer tells Shaw that he is nothing but a mercenary. Shaw replies: “You get paid, too. Doesn’t mean you don’t care.” In the course of the investigation, the two go to a home of a person of interest. The home is uninhabited, and the officer of course cannot enter without a warrant. Shaw, the private citizen, breaks a window, gets into the house, unlocks the door, and says, “I burglarized the home and you’re in hot pursuit” (thus falling into the exigent circumstances exception).

Our lone wolves are not presented as merely complementary to the police: they reach where the police cannot. Each of them is supported by a team that includes a technology whiz who can hack accounts and perform tech feats that leave the official forces far behind.

Most importantly, both guys are benevolent. They are unequivocally presented as fighting for the good guys. The supporting characters are diverse, and the women are resourceful, accomplished, self-actualized, and brave, which is what you’d expect from a TV show in 2025, so there are no culture wars or traditional bigotries at work; the operative variable, though, is an individual’s intellect, resourcefulness, and physical force.

This is not the classic right-wing stuff, though it does harken back to something similar: Lee Majors’ film The Last Chase (1981), which featured a former racecar driver rebelling against a tyrannical system that confiscated private vehicles. But where The Last Chase was a glorification of individuality through consumption and oil, Tracker and Reacher are both minimalists, anti-materialistic, and nurturing to children and women not unlike MacGyver (1985). It’s interesting that the reversion to the mean from the “Defund the Police” days was not “Fund the Police” but rather “outperform the police.”