Finished it last night. I was pretty impressed. Krasinski does a tremendous job (which isn't a big surprise), but Wendell Pierce is FANTASTIC. A really well-written show; I loved the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan novels when I was younger (though you could tell the craft had passed him by when The Bear and the Dragon hit), and this is easily the best adaptation of the character I've seen. The Hunt for Red October might be better, but that's a lot more because of Sean Connery; Krasinski is a much better Jack Ryan than is Alec Baldwin.
The Ryan character is pretty difficult to adapt well to the screen faithfully. In the books, Jack Ryan is pretty content to have a strictly academic, administrative, analytical role. He's forced into the field on very RARE occasions, but he's primarily a cerebral character whose most frequent struggles are strategic or political in nature. A Jack Ryan who perfectly corresponded to the character we see in the books would make for some pretty boring TV, so I understand the impulse that every adaptation has to play down the bookish nerdiness that's always been at the core of the character. (In the books Ryan is trained as an accountant, a stock broker, and an historian. His Marine career lasted only a couple of months before a helicopter accident in training wrecked his back. Giving him combat experience, martial arts training, etc., is an invention of the screen adaptations.)
As I said, there's a real need I recognize to play down the Ryan character's nerdiness, and this is no exception, but Krasinski manages to pull off a Jack Ryan that works as an office-bound analyst while still feeling fairly credible in the field. Chris Pine's character was believable in the latter, but not in the former; Harrison Ford felt right in the office dimension but wrong in the action sequences. Alec Baldwin and Ben Affleck didn't really do either of those very well, IMO. And no spoilers, but this rendition of the character incorporates a sense of moral responsibility and drivenness that hasn't been very present in other adaptations. My one quibble with this take on the character is that it introduces an understated sense of cynicism to the character that's pretty at odds with anything we read in the Clancy canon. It's not a prevalent thread throughout this season, but it could become a bigger pain later on.
My final note is that this take on the Jim Greer character is extremely different, and I'm not altogether certain how I feel about it, other than to say that Wendell Pierce is just AMAZING. Greer's role was played by James Earl Jones in earlier adaptations (although he didn't appear in either The Sum of All Fears or Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit), and it was a pretty straightforward embodiment of the character we see in the book, who is kind of a gentleman patrician, a Navy Vice Admiral with near-Sherlockian analytical and deductive skills and a genius for politics and administration who's smart enough to let younger, more talented hands do the work of planning operations, being more content to serve in a strategic oversight role. Pierce's Greer seems to invert that somewhat: he's gifted on the analytical side in a much more instinctive way, but lacks political finesse and doesn't have any of the warmth that we see in either the novels or in Jones' take on the character. There's even a sense of begrudging cooperation, if not outright antagonism, between Greer and Ryan in this adaptation at times that's utterly alien to the franchise, but which seems to work pretty well for the most part.
All in all, it's a pretty terrific watch. Also, saving the most important observation for last: Abbie Cornish (who plays Ryan's love interest) is a total smokeshow:
The Ryan character is pretty difficult to adapt well to the screen faithfully. In the books, Jack Ryan is pretty content to have a strictly academic, administrative, analytical role. He's forced into the field on very RARE occasions, but he's primarily a cerebral character whose most frequent struggles are strategic or political in nature. A Jack Ryan who perfectly corresponded to the character we see in the books would make for some pretty boring TV, so I understand the impulse that every adaptation has to play down the bookish nerdiness that's always been at the core of the character. (In the books Ryan is trained as an accountant, a stock broker, and an historian. His Marine career lasted only a couple of months before a helicopter accident in training wrecked his back. Giving him combat experience, martial arts training, etc., is an invention of the screen adaptations.)
As I said, there's a real need I recognize to play down the Ryan character's nerdiness, and this is no exception, but Krasinski manages to pull off a Jack Ryan that works as an office-bound analyst while still feeling fairly credible in the field. Chris Pine's character was believable in the latter, but not in the former; Harrison Ford felt right in the office dimension but wrong in the action sequences. Alec Baldwin and Ben Affleck didn't really do either of those very well, IMO. And no spoilers, but this rendition of the character incorporates a sense of moral responsibility and drivenness that hasn't been very present in other adaptations. My one quibble with this take on the character is that it introduces an understated sense of cynicism to the character that's pretty at odds with anything we read in the Clancy canon. It's not a prevalent thread throughout this season, but it could become a bigger pain later on.
My final note is that this take on the Jim Greer character is extremely different, and I'm not altogether certain how I feel about it, other than to say that Wendell Pierce is just AMAZING. Greer's role was played by James Earl Jones in earlier adaptations (although he didn't appear in either The Sum of All Fears or Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit), and it was a pretty straightforward embodiment of the character we see in the book, who is kind of a gentleman patrician, a Navy Vice Admiral with near-Sherlockian analytical and deductive skills and a genius for politics and administration who's smart enough to let younger, more talented hands do the work of planning operations, being more content to serve in a strategic oversight role. Pierce's Greer seems to invert that somewhat: he's gifted on the analytical side in a much more instinctive way, but lacks political finesse and doesn't have any of the warmth that we see in either the novels or in Jones' take on the character. There's even a sense of begrudging cooperation, if not outright antagonism, between Greer and Ryan in this adaptation at times that's utterly alien to the franchise, but which seems to work pretty well for the most part.
All in all, it's a pretty terrific watch. Also, saving the most important observation for last: Abbie Cornish (who plays Ryan's love interest) is a total smokeshow:
