Well, that didn't take long. Reacher is back on top of the streaming charts, and nobody who's been watching this show for four seasons is surprised. The big man's fourth season premiere pulled Prime Video right back to the front of the pack, per the latest Top 10 numbers.

The casualty here is Amazon's new assassin series, which had been sitting pretty at the top before Alan Ritchson's suitcase-sized fists came back to town. I won't pretend the new show was bad, it wasn't, it just ran into the same problem everything runs into when Reacher drops a season. You don't out-muscle Reacher. You just don't.

There's a lesson in this for streamers, and it's the one they keep having to relearn: consistency beats novelty. Reacher is the same show every season. A mysterious small town, a conspiracy that goes way higher than it should, and a quiet mountain of a man who says things like "I don't want trouble" right before distributing trouble to everyone in the room. We know what we're getting. That's the whole sell. It's the action-thriller equivalent of a cheeseburger from a place that's made the same cheeseburger for 40 years.

I've said this before but it bears repeating, Ritchson was born for this role the way some actors are born for one role and spend a career chasing it. He never has to chase anything. He just stands there and is seven feet of reluctant violence.

The new assassin series will be fine, for what it's worth. Charts shuffle weekly, and second place behind television's most reliable battering ram is nothing to panic about. But if you're Amazon, you're probably looking at these numbers and thinking, okay, we don't need to reinvent anything, we just need to keep this man supplied with towns that need fixing.

If you missed the season premiere, that's your assignment for tonight. Don't overthink it.