Jack Ryan Returns to the Screen

Written by Jon Williams

On August 31, the entire eight-episode first season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan became available for streaming. This new iteration brings the character to life for the first time since 2014, and to the small screen for the first time ever. Positive critical and viewer reactions are already rolling in, and the series has already been renewed for a second season.

This time around Ryan is played by John Krasinski, as the series focuses on the early days of the burgeoning CIA agent’s career. Krasinski has been in the pop culture spotlight lately as the star, director, and co-writer of the hit horror flick A Quiet Place, which came out earlier this year. He is probably even better known for his breakout role as Jim Halpert on The Office, which he played for the entirety of the comedy series’ nine-season run. The rest of Jack Ryan’s main cast is rounded out by Wendell Pierce, Abbie Cornish, Ali Suliman, and Dina Shihabi.

The show may be new, but the character of Jack Ryan is anything but. He originally came to be in Tom Clancy’s 1984 The Hunt for Red October. The novel tells how Jack Ryan, at this point a young CIA analyst, helps to ensure the defection of a grizzled Soviet navy captain with a devastating new submarine. The book became a bestseller following huge critical reaction, including an endorsement from President Ronald Reagan. Ryan has since featured in more than twenty novels, including such titles as Clear and Present Danger, Executive Orders, Command Authority, the recently released Line of Sight, and the forthcoming Oath of Office. Sadly, author Tom Clancy passed away in 2013, but the mantle of writing the Ryan character has been taken on by fellow authors Mark Greaney, Mike Maden, and Marc Cameron.

Jack Ryan remained as words on a page until 1990. That was the year The Hunt for Red October made him a big-screen sensation as well, bringing in over $120 million at the domestic box office. The movie featured a star-studded cast that included Sean Connery, Sam Neill, and James Earl Jones, as well as Alec Baldwin as Ryan himself. It was followed in 1992 with Patriot Games, with Harrison Ford taking over as Jack Ryan, a role he reprised in 1994’s Clear and Present Danger. The series was rebooted with 2002’s The Sum of All Fears, with Ben Affleck in the main character’s role. That movie took Clancy’s novel of the same name from 1991 and updated it for a 2002 setting. The series was then rebooted again in 2014 with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, an original origin story not based on any specific Clancy book, this time with Chris Pine starring.

And that’s where Jack Ryan’s screen presence left off, until the new streaming series debuted two weeks ago. As more and more people discover the show, Tom Clancy’s audiobooks and the past movies are sure to be in demand. Use the links above to find the materials, or SmartBrowse ‘Jack Ryan’ on our website for a full list of audiobooks we carry in the series.