Jack Ryan is a show that knows exactly what it wants to be and is mostly quite successful at it

Rolling Stone

"It’s an entertaining watch, but owing more to the sheer craft of the people making it than to anything particularly compelling about Ryan himself," says Alan Sepinwall of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan on Amazon. "Competent storytelling isn’t something that should need praising for a TV show in 2018, yet Jack Ryan ... stands in striking contrast to so many sluggishly-paced, poorly-lit streaming drama wallows of recent vintage. It moves briskly and offers up at least one big action set piece per episode — though nothing as impressive as in the Ryan films, nor even TV shows like Strike Back or Daredevil. The production makes good use of international locations and the writers put in the necessary effort to make terrorist big bad Suleiman (Ali Suliman) a human being with recognizable motivations. It’s familiar but never dull."

ALSO:

• Jack Ryan is rote television: blandly entertaining with paint-by-numbers plotting -- it's the airport book of TV shows
• Jack Ryan knows when to get John Krasinski out of the way and concentrate on telling other stories
• Krasinski and his "aw-shucks charm" makes it stand out among similar anti-terrorist shows
• Krasinski is the perfect actor to portray a modern Jack Ryan: "immensely likable without being slick, accessible but not too vulnerable, smart but not wonky"
• At this moment in time, Jack Ryan’s anvil-dropping approach to the war on terror is grotesque, selling a false narrative people believe is true
• Jack Ryan is great, but "one- or two-note actor" Krasinski is not -- thankfully, Wendell Pierce helps fill the void
• If Jack Ryan is the white male superhero we must rely on to save the world, it’d be nice to know him a little better
• Jack Ryan is the most boring part of Jack Ryan
• Krasinski and the Jack Ryan brand help power it through the "clutter" of TV shows revolving around Middle Eastern terrorism
• Why producers picked John Krasinski: He's intelligent, earnest and relatable -- and not larger than life
• How Wendell Pierce researched playing a black Muslim CIA boss
• Ranking all the Jack Ryan actors: Krasinski is No. 3