Go West | 13 September 2018

This week’s guilty pleasure is Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime). It’s trash, of course, but very well done, high-octane, watchable trash. And if you want to feel better about your lowbrow tastes, make sure you read the finger-wagging critique by one Sonia Saraiya in Vanity Fair first.

‘Jack Ryan feels like a machine designed to turn us all into the sort of viewers who disappear smiling down jingoistic Fox News rabbit holes,’ she says, enticingly. And: ‘Both its protagonist and its plot are based on the foundational, unquestioned notion that American-military might — the best-funded killing infrastructure in human history — is helping to save the world.’ And: ‘Its other primary story objective is proving that Jack Ryan deserves his white male entitlement…’

Not so much a guilty pleasure after that little lecture, then; more a bounden and sacred duty.

Anyway, in fairness the series does attempt the occasional nod towards contemporary liberal sensibilities. Ryan’s capable, massively underrated black station boss (Wendell Pierce) turns out to be a lapsed but now newly observant Muslim who deplores it when anyone says anything Islamophobic. The MacGuffin that sets off the whole cycle of violence is a random attack on an innocent Lebanese household by (presumably) US-funded Israeli jets. There’s even a somewhat implausible subplot shoehorned in where a drone operator, wasting jihadis remotely from his air base in Las Vegas, gets a fit of conscience after he kills an innocent man and embarks on a touching pilgrimage of redemption.

Also, many of the Muslim characters — even some of the baddies — are to a degree sympathetic, with rounded personalities, hinterland, and finer actors playing them. The performances by the American actors — notably John Krasinski, better known as a comedy character from the US version of The Office — are perfectly serviceable.