Who doesn’t love a bit of high-stakes espionage, political brinksmanship, and murky moral choices? It’s a recipe that sent Tom Clancy to his grave a rich man, and the airport novel king’s legacy lives on as every episode of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan season 3 is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Having previously been played by (deep breath) Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine, heroic CIA analyst Jack Ryan now finds himself embodied by The Office star John Krasinski, and his life and world updated to reflect our current post-Cold War reality (debate has raged in Clancy fan spaces over the perceived liberties the series has taken).
This season, Jack finds himself on the run from his erstwhile CIA allies, having been framed for some nasty business. Complicating the situation is the fact that he’s uncovered evidence that a cadre of old Soviet Union hardliners are planning to resurrect the Communist superpower by means of an untraceable nuclear bomb—a sudden nuke detonation in continental Europe being just the thing to stir up international unrest.
Returning to the cast are series regulars Wendell Pierce as James Greer, Jack’s boss at the CIA, and Michael Kelly as senior CIA operative Mike November, who surely sports one of the greatest names in the history of spy fiction. Joining them is Get Out’s Betty Gabriel as CIA Agent Elizabeth Wright, legendary character actor James Cosmo as Soviet hardass Luka Gocharov, and Tár’s Nina Hoss as the President of Czechoslovakia, which may provide a clue as to where that errant nuke is gonna wind up.
Tom Clancy’s particular brand of political technothriller reliably supplies thrills and solemn pronouncements in drab offices in roughly equal measure—dad fodder, in other words. There’s nothing wrong with that—sometimes you just want to watch a resourceful everyman wrest the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation, in which case Amazon Prime has you amply covered.
