Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan

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Season 1
Season #: 4, 3, 2, 1
Metascore
66

Generally favorable reviews - based on 28 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 18 out of 28
  2. Mixed: 10 out of 28
  3. Negative: 0 out of 28
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Critic Reviews

  1. Vox.com
    Reviewed by: Karen Han
    Aug 31, 2018
    60
    Ryan’s part of the story is a breeze: He’s the good soldier, here to save the day. Sometimes he’ll face some sort of moral dilemma, but it’s never too difficult to guess what the outcome will be. The rest of the series is much thornier, and all the more real for it.
  2. CNN
    Reviewed by: Brian Lowry
    Aug 30, 2018
    60
    John Krasinski is a strong choice to capture the terrorist-battling hero in his formative years, but the resulting series feels a bit too much like "Homeland" meets "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles."
  3. TVLine
    Reviewed by: Dave Nemetz
    Aug 20, 2018
    58
    Until Jack Ryan finds a way to make its drama as compelling as its action scenes, it’ll go down as a mission not quite accomplished.
  5. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Kathryn VanArendonk
    Aug 30, 2018
    50
    The show gestures at ambiguity, and at the edges of its map, the borders between righteousness and zealotry get thinner and less clear. In the center, though, at the axis around which everything spins, the math is simpler. Jack Ryan: good. Terrorists: bad. If Jack Ryan spent more time shading in Ryan’s personal world, there might be more chance for the character to feel three-dimensional.
  6. Boston Herald
    Reviewed by: Mark A. Perigard
    Aug 30, 2018
    50
    Jack Ryan excels at pyrotechnics. Walls, trucks and people explode in spectacular arrays of destruction. Its fight choreography gets muddy, especially when Jack is tussling with some terrorist. ... The most charitable thing that can be said about Krasinski’s performance here is that he looks deeply, deeply tired.
  7. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Hank Stuever
    Aug 30, 2018
    50
    While it may not have been the creators’ intent, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan gets a whole lot better--and more modern, relevant and thoughtful--when Jack Ryan isn’t in it.
  8. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Matthew Gilbert
    Aug 29, 2018
    50
    Jack Ryan is generic.
  9. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Tim Surette
    Aug 27, 2018
    50
    It's a pretty standard entry into the genre with a few good exceptions and one glaring problem: its bland titular hero.
  10. The Daily Beast
    Reviewed by: Kevin Fallon
    Aug 27, 2018
    50
    Until it picks up narrative steam almost two-thirds of the way through the season, Jack Ryan is rote television: blandly entertaining.
  11. Collider
    Reviewed by: Vinnie Mancuso
    Aug 20, 2018
    40
    It’s just odd to realize mid-way through that a show featuring this many explosions and gratuitous, all-too-familiar terrorist attacks can also be this boring. ... Krasinski lends an un-earned charisma to the character through sheer presence alone, but the nature of the character itself forces him into the background of most situations looking like he’d much, much rather be playing Minesweeper.

Awards & Rankings

98
#98 Best TV Season of 2018
22
#22 Most Discussed TV Season of 2018
72
#72 Most Shared TV Season of 2018

User Reviews

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User Score
6.4

Generally favorable reviews- based on 160 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 104 out of 160
  2. Mixed: 23 out of 160
  3. Negative: 33 out of 160
  1. JadenFrost
    Sep 5, 2018
    1
    Yet another show that should have been conservative, but is painfully obviously written by liberals. Deeply stupid, and unrealistic even byYet another show that should have been conservative, but is painfully obviously written by liberals. Deeply stupid, and unrealistic even by fictions standards. Not really worth watching.… Full Review »
  2. apparules
    Sep 4, 2018
    3
    I really wanted to like this. I'd bought into the various ad campaigns.
    I thought it could be like Homeland and present a different vision.    I really wanted to like this. I'd bought into the various ad campaigns.
    I thought it could be like Homeland and present a different vision.
    I thought Amazon wanted to get into the premium shows market, unfortunately, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is full of so many tired tropes and just doesn't give us enough meat to want to overlook them. There's the 'bad guy that slips away at the last second' trick. The 'inept CIA agent who unwittingly helps the bad guy', darn it! The 'oh, he's running away, it never occurred to me to chase him' tension-builder. It's all just formulaic in a way that's no longer captivating in the golden age or TV.    … Full Review »
  3. patterninstatic
    Sep 3, 2018
    5
    This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view. Binge worthy show with plenty of action, that can be enjoyable to watch as long as you can maintain an extreme suspension of disbelief throughout the experience. Spoilers ahead.

    Indeed, in order to keep the story on track and at a brisk pace, the plotline revolves around glaring logical leaps, insane coincidences, and deus ex-machina. Characters on the show go from having ridiculous epiphanies to being completely oblivious as the show sees fit.

    Ryan can randomly guess that an eight digit number is a prison ID for unlocking the phone (even though 8 numbers could correspond to a date) after randomly opening the file to a page with the prison number on top. This is after IDing the bad guy based on a hand gesture that he made on video with cuffs (arguably he could have simply learned to present his hands for cuffs from being cuffed multiple times since his capture in Yemen). On the flip side the good guys are pretty stupid when it comes to preventing the evil master plan. it would seem pretty standard protocol once it had been established that Ebola was in play to make everything and everyone from the compound go through quarantine. Once you have established that somewhere in DC could be targeted by an attack, it would also seem logical to secure the president instead of having him, the VP, and members of congress publicly quarantined in a single essentially a public location in the middle of the city.

    On top of this, the characters are ridiculously cliche and the backstories are stupidly stretched. Ryan could just have PTSD from deployment, but instead they have to one up it.... in trying to save an innocent boy, Ryan personally led to everyone's death. Despite this, Ryan has strong moral values, constantly being the one who reminds everyone that the end doesn't justify the means. We get it...

    Cliche scenes get repeated. Army personnel arriving to tell someone, "you have to come with us to this super high level meeting because you stumbled onto something".... Ryan speaking up at top level meetings when you know he's not supposed to...Ryan being asked to "stay back while we go in" then ending up where the real action is.

    The show also introduces random subplots that are meant to humanize but in reality distract. The drone subplot is fun as long as you don't ask questions. The drone pilots are supposed to operate in the same village every mission to the point of recognizing an unfamiliar SUV, yet the bad guys are constantly circulating in armed convoys nearby. Seriously, the pilot goes to Syria to meet the family of the man he killed, in militant controlled territory, speaking only English and with just a bag full of cash, and they share a warm moment.

    This is regular flaw. The show wants to fit in particular scenes, narratives, or subplots, and does so even if it defies logic or pacing. When the mother and children get put into protective custody, with a full system in place to isolate them, the girl is still given a video game console which can communicate over the internet, which she uses to talk to her brother in Syria. Ryan brilliantly deduced that the terrorists communicated over a video game based essentially on nothing (the two boys in Paris bickering), yet no one can see how giving the girl a device that can connect online can be a problem.

    Also it seems that the producers decided that the events in France were going to be a huge battle in Paris, followed by an one on one encounter in the Alps. To justify this, for some reason a huge brigade gets sent to the apartment in Paris when the address is just an "address of interest", but then after a huge battle happens, multiple people are killed etc., the French government decides to tone it down and simply send two police agents along with two Americans to follow a person who would essentially be public enemy number one.

    The "evil plot" is convoluted to the point of being a little stupid when you spend a few seconds to think about it. The terrorists go to Liberia to get an Ebola infected body, that they being back to Azerbaijan to extract the Ebola, so that they can infect a captured friend of the president, so they can get the president quarantined in a hospital, which they will access by blowing up a nearby pizza joint, ultimately in the hopes of putting irradiated powder which they sneak into the US, in the airways of the hospital in order to kill the president. The "bomb" is hooked up to the hospital landline (what?) and in a very "first world problems" scene, the final showdown consists of Ryan trying to stop the terrorists before their cellphones can find network.

    It seems like I'm only giving negatives, but this show still deserves a 5. Despite being bad you can have fun watching it. The decent acting and big budget action contrast with an extremely bad plot to make this an average show.    … Full Review »
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