'Reacher' Creator Nick Santora Doesn’t Get Enough Credit for Making a Bunch of Good Dad Shows

You may not know his name, but you like at least one thing he's written

We want a Reacher, not a belly eetcher. Jasper Savage/Prime

Reacher, America’s most important Dad Show, is back for Season 3. There are many shows that are better than Reacher, but very few that I enjoy as much. It’s just so much fun. It’s not really a comedy, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and embraces how inherently absurd the character of Reacher is. He’s basically a superhero, with the mind of Sherlock Holmes, the body of an action figure, and the wisecracks of a Marvel character. In less capable hands than Alan Ritchson’s, he’d be annoying, but Ritchson is so charismatic that he makes it work.

Reacher doesn’t only come from Ritchson, though. The novels are by Lee Child, but his Reacher is more serious than the one on the show. Show Reacher was developed by creator Nick Santora, who’s becoming the David E. Kelley of action dramedy. He’s one of the hardest working writer-producers in TV right now – pretty soon, he’ll have three shows on at the same time – but he isn’t a household name. But here at Dad Shows, I respect the Dads who bring us our Shows. So say “salute” to Nick Santora from Hewlett, Long Island.

Before he became a writer, Santora worked for seven years as a lawyer. His first produced screenplay was an episode of The Sopranos. How’s that for a debut? It was a Season 4 episode, “Watching Too Much Television,” which is the one where Tony whips Assemblyman Zellman with a belt for having an affair with Tony’s ex-mistress Irina. He shares the teleplay credit with Terence Winter, who also worked as a lawyer before he became a TV writer. I read an old interview where Santora said Winter is one of the nicest people he’s ever met, and while I don’t know Winter well enough to say that, I would say he’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever interviewed. Winter and Santora never worked together after that, but Winter did blurb Santora’s novel Fifteen Digits, which is a very nice thing to do.

After that Sopranos breakthrough, Santora wrote on a show called The Guardian, which ran for three seasons on CBS in the early 2000s and seems to have been completely forgotten, and then on Law & Order, before finding major success on Prison Break. He wrote 17 episodes over the course of the show’s run, rising through the ranks from producer to co-executive producer. During that time, he also wrote the screenplays for the movies The Longshots and Punisher: War Zone, the former of which was directed by Fred Durst. So that means David Chase is two degrees of separation away from DJ Lethal.

He was also an executive producer on the reality competition show Beauty and the Geek, where a bimbo and a dweebazoid do challenges together. I’m not sure how he got involved in that, but I’m sure it’s an interesting story. In 2007, Vulture asked him how he came up with the idea, and he said “Look at me and my wife and you’ll see where the idea comes from.”

Breakout Dads

The first scripted show he created was Breakout Kings, which ran for two seasons on A&E between 2011 and 2012. He created it with fellow Prison Break writer Matt Olmstead, who went on to become one of the lead producers of the One Chicago franchise. It was about a U.S. Marshals task force that includes current inmates helping to catch fugitives. Future Reacher stars Malcolm Goodwin and Serinda Swan were on it.

After Breakout Kings was canceled, Santora wrote for Vegas, a period crime drama created by GoodFellas and Casino screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi that starred Dennis Quaid and Michael Chiklis. James Mangold directed the pilot. It only lasted one season on CBS. I have no memory of it whatsoever, but it sounds cool and I’d like to watch it.

He broke away from being pigeonholed as the prison break guy with the next show he created, Scorpion, which was about a team of super-geniuses protecting the world from tech-based threats, and the normal woman who helps them be more emotionally intelligent. It was a CBS action drama version of The Big Bang Theory. “Any comparisons to Big Bang Theory, we’ll all take it — and we’ll take their ratings,” Santora said before the show premiered. It ran for four seasons between 2014 and 2018, and neither you nor anyone you know ever watched it.

The Most Dangerous Dad

In 2020, he had two projects on Quibi, the short-lived, ill-advised streaming service where every show was under 10 minutes long. I was obsessed with Quibi. I wrote capsule reviews for TV Guide of every show it launched with, one of which was Most Dangerous Game, Santora’s take on the public domain classic with Christoph Waltz and Liam Hemsworth. This was my review:

In an attempt to earn money he desperately needs, Liam Hemsworth agrees to be hunted by assassins in this sub-direct-to-VOD-quality thriller. It's shockingly bad. I don't have time to list every way this show is a failure, so here are the big ones: The performances are inert. The usually riveting two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz is boring somehow. The pacing and structure are baffling. Two minutes of one nine-minute episode are devoted to watching Hemsworth go for a run. During the second episode, you will check if you accidentally watched the episodes out of order. You didn't. The game doesn't start until the very end of the fourth episode. You almost certainly won't make it that far.

Lol. I think after Quibi imploded, Most Dangerous Game got recut into a movie and it was much better than the show. Against many odds, it returned for a second season in 2023 on the Roku Channel, sort of as a side project for Santora and Reacher director (what in the) Sam Hill, with David Castañeda as the prey. Most Dangerous Game Season 1 is the only thing for which Santora has earned an Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series. But Reacher should win an Emmy for Best Dad Show. His other Quibi show was a remake of The Fugitive with Kiefer Sutherland. I remember watching one episode, but I don’t remember anything about it.

Santora’s career really picked up after Quibi. Reacher debuted in 2022 and became the biggest hit of his career, and the best show he’s created. It’s the perfect vessel for his dumb-in-a-smart-way sensibility. It makes perfect sense that the creator of Reacher wrote for The Sopranos and also Scorpion. He knows how to make funny drama, and he knows how to make elevated versions of CBS-style material. His take is only ever so slightly elevated, but that’s exactly what the material calls for. Twenty years of experience goes into crafting Reacher’s particular tone, so Santora’s contributions should not be taken for granted. He’s also working on a Reacher spinoff called Neagley, starring Maria Sten’s private investigator character Frances Neagley. It’s in production now, so it will probably premiere next year.

Santora also created FUBAR, which premiered on Netflix in 2023 and has a second season in the works. That one stars Arnold Schwarzengger and Monica Barbaro as father-and-daughter CIA agents. What Scorpion is to The Big Bang Theory, FUBAR is to True Lies. Santora has a knack for repackaging existing ideas. He’s not an auteur, but he is a hitmaker, and the world needs them, too. I hope he gets to create a New York City legal thriller someday.