Chris McPherson

Published Sep 23, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT

Chris is a Senior News Writer for Collider. He can be found in an IMAX screen, with his eyes watering and his ears bleeding for his own pleasure. He joined the news team in 2022 and accidentally fell upwards into a senior position despite his best efforts.

For reasons unknown, he enjoys analyzing box office receipts, giant sharks, and has become known as the go-to man for all things Bosch, Mission: Impossible and Christopher Nolan in Collider’s news division. Recently, he found himself yeehawing along to the Dutton saga on the Yellowstone Ranch.

He is proficient in sarcasm, wit, Photoshop and working unfeasibly long hours. Amongst his passions sit the likes of the history of the Walt Disney Company, the construction of theme parks, steam trains and binge-watching Gilmore Girls with a coffee that is just hot enough to scald him.

His obsession with the Apple TV+ series Silo is the subject of mockery within the Senior News channel, where his feelings about Taylor Sheridan’s work are enough to make his fellow writers roll their eyes.

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Jack Reacher has seen his fair share of depravity over the years. He’s seen violence and suffering; he even ripped off a man’s ear just a few weeks ago. And it’s not as if Prime Video’s Reacher has sanitized his world either, with Alan Ritchson routinely finding himself surrounded by scumbags doing vile things and having their deeds, for lack of a better expression, equalized and dispatched by whatever means necessary. Season 5, however, is adapting a Jack Reacher novel that even creator and author Lee Child himself describes as “disgusting.”

The next season will adapt Make Me, Child’s 20th Reacher novel, which begins with Reacher stepping off a train in the tiny town of Mother’s Rest simply because he wants to discover where its peculiar name came from. If this seems strange to you, you may want to brush up on your Reacher knowledge. This is a man who stumbled into the murder of his own brother purely because he was tracking down a blues musician in Georgia. In Mother’s Rest, he meets private investigator Michelle Chang, whose colleague has vanished while investigating the town, but what initially looks like another disappearance gradually becomes something much worse. Speaking exclusively with Collider, Child admitted that even he doesn’t know exactly how Prime Video will translate the novel’s most disturbing material to television. He said:

“Make Me, which they are — that’s going to be Season 5. How they’re going to do that, I do not know, because that is a brutal story. I mean, it’s a disgusting story, really. It’s not fit for family consumption, so I don’t know what they’re going to do about the actual crime in that. It is relatively rural, you know, the immense plains and cornfields and all of that.”

Child isn’t exaggerating about the novel’s central crime. The mystery eventually leads Reacher and Chang to discover that Mother’s Rest is hiding an operation built around facilitating the deaths of vulnerable people.

Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.

You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.

The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.

You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.

Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.

The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Potential spoilers for Make Me follow.

In Make Me​​​​​​, the perpetrators locate suicidal individuals online and exploit them for profit, offering what is presented as a way out before murdering them on camera for paying customers. The conspiracy surrounding Mother’s Rest exists largely to protect that business, with anyone who gets too close to discovering what’s happening becoming another problem that needs to disappear. That’s considerably nastier than the drug operations, corrupt businesses, and criminal conspiracies Reacher regularly dismantles. The horror isn’t simply that people are being murdered; it’s that desperation itself has been commodified, with vulnerable people turned into entertainment for customers willing to pay to watch them die.

Season 5, therefore, has an interesting line to walk because if Prime Video removes too much, you risk losing what makes Mother’s Rest so profoundly sinister in the novel, but if you reproduce everything too faithfully, you’ve got exactly the problem Child identifies: Make Me really isn’t “fit for family consumption.” Of course, nobody has ever accused Reacher of being family viewing in the first place. Season 5 may be about to test even its limits. Reacher Seasons 1–4 are streaming on Prime Video.

Lee Child was speaking exclusively to Collider in support of Chain Reaction, the latest Jack Reacher novel, which arrives October 20. Child will also co-write Zero Margin, the first Frances Neagley novel, with Yasmin Angoe, arriving in spring 2027. Listen to the Reacher novels and more with a free trial of Audible here.

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Omar Madha, Carol Banker, Julian Holmes, Lin Oeding, M.J. Bassett, Norberto Barba, Stephen Surjik, Thomas Vincent

Alan Ritchson

When retired Military Police Officer Jack Reacher is arrested for a murder he did not commit, he finds himself in the middle of a deadly conspiracy full of dirty cops, shady businessmen and scheming politicians. With nothing but his wits, he must figure out what is happening in Margrave, Georgia. The first season of Reacher is based on the international bestseller The Killing Floor by Lee Child.