Prime Video's 'Reacher' Fans Need To See These 10 Action Thriller Shows

4 hours ago 7

Published Mar 6, 2026, 6:46 PM EST

Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.

We get it, Reacher is great. The man is massive (the man being Alan Ritchson), the fights are satisfying, and watching the Army vet-turned-drifter methodically dismantle every bad guy in the small towns he always ends up in never gets old. But look, Prime Video has quietly built one of the best libraries of action thrillers on any streaming platform, and it'd basically be a crime to overlook them while waiting for that show's next season.

Whether you're in the mood for high-stakes espionage, psychological cat-and-mouse games, a cold-case obsession, or couples who might actually kill each other (sometimes literally), there's a show on this list for you. Here are the Prime Video action thrillers that deserve your couch time — and yes, a few of them might just edge out the big guy himself.

'Steal' (2026)

Sophie Turner sheds her Queen in the North crown to step into the world of modern-day heist thrillers with one of the streamer’s newer offerings. Steal follows Zara (Turner), a hungover office drone at a London pension management firm who shows up to what should be a forgettable Tuesday and instead finds herself in the middle of a £4 billion armed robbery. The twist? She was in on it the whole time! What starts as a slick, propulsive crypto caper quickly shapeshifts into something even more interesting: an adrenaline-pumping nail-biter with a side of workplace betrayal, government conspiracy, romantic entanglement, and the kind of moral murkiness that keeps you second-guessing literally everyone on screen.

At just six episodes, the show is short enough to binge in a night and tight enough that it never wastes a scene. Archie Madekwe (fresh off Saltburn's chaos) plays Zara's best friend and co-conspirator Luke, while Jacob Fortune-Lloyd rounds out the triangle as the detective investigating the very criminal he's falling for. It's a show about how money corrupts and how the line between victim and villain is mostly a matter of perspective.

'Cross' (2024–Present)

Aldis Hodge as Alex Cross in the police station working on the case in Cross Season 2

James Patterson's Alex Cross has had a rough run on screen: Morgan Freeman did his best, Tyler Perry tried his hardest, and both resulted in forgettable movies. Enter Aldis Hodge, who takes the character and turns him into something genuinely compelling for TV fans. Cross follows Alex Cross, a Washington D.C. forensic psychologist and homicide detective who is also a grieving widower, devoted father, and the kind of brilliant, obsessive investigator who gets dangerously close to the minds he's trying to understand. Season 1 pits him against a serial killer invented specifically for the show while he navigates a politically loaded case and the constant threat of his work bleeding into his family life.

What makes Cross work where the films didn't is space. Television gives the character room to breathe, which means we dive deep into his trauma and his rage, all while he chases down America's worst criminals. Hodge is so intense and charismatic, it's almost impossible to look away when he's onscreen, but the rest of the cast — Isaiah Mustafa, Jeanine Mason, and Matthew Lillard — bring some depth and excitement when they pop up in later seasons.

'Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan' (2018–2023)

John Krasinski as Jack Ryan and Wendell Pierce as James Greer walking together in 'Jack Ryan.'

Before Prime Video had Reacher, it had Jack Ryan, and honestly, Jack Ryan might have the better geopolitical IQ. The series follows CIA analyst Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) as he's repeatedly dragged out of his comfortable desk job and thrown directly into global crises: a rising jihadist threat in the Middle East, Venezuelan political collapse, a shadowy Russian conspiracy, and more. Each season essentially functions as its own movie-length international thriller. The show globe-trots… literally, filming on location across multiple continents as it commits just as hard to its intellectual storytelling as its action sequences.

What keeps Jack Ryan compelling is that it treats its antagonists with actual nuance. The show consistently asks hard questions about American foreign policy, the costs of intervention, and what it means to be a "good guy" in a world without clean moral lines. And Krasinski does a lot of that leg work, making Ryan feel like an actual human being rather than a cartoon superhero. He gets scared, he makes mistakes, and he's never the most physically imposing person in the room. Four seasons, a consistent level of quality, and an ending that actually delivers. Reacher wishes.

'The Terminal List' (2022–Present)

Chris Pratt as James Reece walking forward and looking determined in The Terminal List

Chris Pratt channeling his serious side is a rare occurrence on-screen, but The Terminal List mostly makes the case for why he should lean into the dramatics more often. Based on Jack Carr's novel, the show follows James Reece (Pratt), a Navy SEAL who returns from a disastrous mission in which his entire platoon was killed, only to discover that the ambush wasn't enemy action – it was a setup. What follows is a revenge thriller that doubles as a conspiracy drama. Reece has a kill list of people responsible for the deaths of his men and most of the fun comes in watching him work his way through it. It's darker and more unrelenting than most streaming thrillers dare to be, with a body count that keeps climbing and a protagonist who is absolutely not holding it together.

But the show never shirks its responsibility to authentically portray the psychological toll that combat exacts on people trained to absorb punishment and keep moving. The supporting cast is stacked: Constance Wu, Taylor Kitsch, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Riley Keough all circle Reece's increasingly isolated world. Critics may have been divided, but audiences embraced it hard, and it's easy to see why: this is meat-and-potatoes action thriller filmmaking with tangible, terrifying stakes.

'The Night Manager' (2016–Present)

Jonathan Pine standing past an open window in The Night Manager Season 2

If you haven't watched The Night Manager yet, just stop reading here and go do that. (No, seriously, why are you still here?) Based on John le Carré's novel, this BBC-Amazon co-production is essentially the spy thriller distilled to its purest form: gorgeous locations, impeccable performances, a morally ambiguous hero, and one of the best villains in recent television history. Tom Hiddleston plays Jonathan Pine, a hotel manager recruited by British intelligence to infiltrate the inner circle of Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), a charming, cultured arms dealer who conducts weapons deals the way most people plan dinner parties.

Laurie was born to play the villain and Roper is so intimidating because he's a master at masking his deceit behind a witty, likable facade. Hiddleston navigates his own emotional tightrope with quiet brilliance and eventually, Olivia Colman shows up as the MI6 officer running this whole operation. Spoiler: she's magnificent. This is the show you recommend to people who claim they don't like spy thrillers.

'Ballard' (2025–Present)

The Bosch universe has been one of Prime Video's most reliable franchises, and Ballard – its newest spin-off – proves the world Michael Connelly built has more stories to tell. Maggie Q stars as Detective Renée Ballard, who has been demoted and reassigned to run the LAPD's cold case division: an underfunded, understaffed unit composed largely of volunteers, retirees, and one very enthusiastic empty-nester. It sounds like a procedural setup, and it is, but Ballard keeps pulling the rug out from under you, as the cold cases it digs into start connecting to something much more dangerous: a serial killer and a conspiracy reaching deep into the LAPD itself.

Maggie Q has been criminally underutilized since Nikita, and Ballard corrects that immediately. Her character is steely and emotionally complex. Titus Welliver drops in as Harry Bosch in a few episodes, but the show never leans on that connection as a crutch. All ten episodes dropped at once, which means the season-long mystery unspools exactly as Connelly designed his novels.

'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' (2024–Present)

Maya Erskine and Donald Glover looking disheveled after a fight and staring ahead in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

The Donald Glover version of Mr. & Mrs. Smith has almost nothing in common with the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie film except the title and the basic premise: two spies in a cover marriage who may or may not want to kill each other… and it is massively better for it. The Amazon series turns the concept into something stranger and funnier than you'd expect. It's really a relationship drama that uses the spy thriller genre as a pressure cooker for two people who are forced into domestic intimacy while having to figure out, mission by mission, whether they actually like each other. The answer keeps changing.

Each episode feels almost like a short film with different tones and different guest stars dropping in to complicate the central dynamic. Maya Erskine is the secret weapon here, playing her Smith with a dry precision that matches Glover perfectly. The action sequences are sharp when they come, but the real tension is in the pair's dynamic: are we actually falling in love or are we just trained to perform attachment? The finale attempts an answer while swinging for something genuinely bold and a bit insane. Season 2 cannot come soon enough.

'Absentia' (2017–2020)

Stana Katic built a devoted audience on Castle, and Absentia is what she did when she decided she wanted to go somewhere much darker. The series follows FBI agent Emily Byrne, who disappeared while hunting a serial killer and was eventually declared dead, only to resurface six years later in a lakeside cabin, with no memory of that missing time and all the evidence pointing to her as the killer everyone's been looking for. What follows across three seasons is a relentless psychological thriller that keeps redefining everything. Who is Emily, really? What actually happened to her? Should we trust any answers this show gives us when it comes to either question?

Absentia has managed to stay hidden on the streamer because it didn't come with a big budget or star-studded cast. What it does have is a genuinely propulsive mystery, a lead performance from Katic that is doing all the heavy emotional lifting, and a willingness to take its premise somewhere genuinely uncomfortable. There are three seasons here, each one escalating the stakes, so pace yourself.

'Hunters' (2020–2023)

Hunters is maximalist, pulpy, outrageous, and completely committed to its own deranged logic. In other words, it's a damn blast! Set in 1977 New York, the series follows a ragtag team of Nazi hunters who have discovered that hundreds of former SS officers have embedded themselves in American society and are plotting a Fourth Reich. Al Pacino plays Meyer Offerman, the eccentric billionaire financier of the whole operation, and the show uses its genre roots to go absolutely feral: revenge fantasies, elaborate kills, retro aesthetics, and a manic energy that makes its two seasons feel like an extended grindhouse movie.

What keeps Hunters from being purely exploitation is the genuine weight it brings to the Holocaust material. The show doesn't let you enjoy the revenge without understanding the why. Logan Lerman, Josh Radnor, Jerrika Hinton, and a gloriously demented turn from Dylan Baker as one of the Nazi infiltrators. This is the show you watch when you want your action thriller to also make you feel something.

'Hanna' (2019–2021)

Hanna takes the premise of the 2011 Joe Wright film – a girl raised in the wilderness by her ex-CIA father, trained to be the ultimate weapon – and expands it into something richer and more complicated. Esme Creed-Miles plays Hanna, a teenager who has never known a life outside the forest and her father's brutal training regimen, but who is suddenly thrown into a world she was never allowed to understand. The CIA operative who created the program that made her (a cold and menacing Mireille Enos) has been hunting her for years. What follows across three seasons is part action series, part coming-of-age story, and part meditation on what it means to be human when you were engineered to be a weapon.

Creed-Miles is excellent as the titular "heroine," navigating a character who is simultaneously lethal and lost. She's capable of disabling a room full of trained operatives and completely unprepared for the experience of having a friend. The second and third seasons introduce a school full of girls who've been through similar programs, and the show uses that expansion to dig into questions of free will, identity, and sisterhood with more intelligence than you'd expect from an action thriller. That's most definitely a good thing.