In the late ’80s and into the ’90s, people around the world were addicted toTom Clancy’s characterJack Ryan, an American version ofIan Fleming’s spy extraordinaire James Bond. The prolific author’s novels follow the adventures of the brilliant economics professor-turned-CIA analyst and black ops field agent lurking in the shadows while trying to piece together his latest riveting global espionage crisis. Clancy’s readership was off the charts with an incredible thirteen books that toppedThe New York Timesbestseller list.This started withThe Hunt for Red October, which was originally published in 1984, which also served as our introduction to Ryan, a numbers cruncher who’s forced into jumping out of Black Hawk helicopters.
Jack Ryan has appeared in twenty Tom Clancy novels. Some of the familiar titles that have reached the top of the literary world followingRed OctoberincludePatriot Games,Clear and Present Danger, andThe Sum of All Fears, all of which were adapted into hugely successful films. Everything Clancy wrote for a ten-year period might as well have been embroidered with pure gold. So the question is: were any of the stories that we’ve seen in the last four years of the Prime Video seriesTom Clancy’s Jack Ryanpulled from the page?
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Is the John Krasinski-led Series Based on Books?
The quick answer is no, not directly. The stories that have been adapted from Tom Clancy’s espionage and global terrorism novels have not been used for theJohn Krasinskivehicle, and with the show wrapping up after Season 4, it doesn’t appear that will change.While Jack Ryan has gone through five different leading men, includingAlec Baldwin,Harrison Ford,Ben Affleck,Chris Pine, and Krasinski, his characteristics and personality have remained largely unchanged. Krasinski’s Jack Ryan is just as intuitive, clever, and sometimes reckless as the version Clancy created back in the mid-80s. Similar to the way Fleming’s James Bond character has passed through more than a half dozen dashing and rakish iterations, each actor has always maintained the same traits that made him one of the most popular spies ever to be adapted to the screen. But each actor has brought a little something different to the part, as Ford was an older family man while the other versions have all been younger, single men.
The Series Tried to Adapt ‘Clear and Present Danger’
In a 2018 interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunnersCarlton CuseandGraham Rolandexplained that they wanted to use a Clancy original story for Season 1. According to Roland, “We tried to adaptClear and Present Danger.About a month into it, we realized the reason the Clancy books worked so well was that they were relevant for the time that they were written. So we had to take the spirit of what he did and create our own original story.”
It’s a very subtle and complimentary way of saying that Clancy’s books were outdated and needed to be modernized for a new generation of television viewers. So much has changed in the forty years since Jack Ryan first boarded the Red October to prevent an American nuclear strike. The enormous leaps in technology in the last fifteen years alone would have rendered most of Clancy’s period-specific Cold War literature either moot or outdated. So the decision was made to introduce Jack Ryan in his own series less than four years into his CIA job, giving the character a lot of room to grow.
‘Jack Ryan’ Has Benefited From Original Stories
If you go back and watch the adaptations of Clancy’s novels, likePatriot GamesandClear and Present Danger, you can see the spirit of Ryan that Roland and Cuse wanted to keep in the franchise. That said, the character was written in the early ’90s and some of the technical intelligence and data system analysis from the books and movies doesn’t translate very well in 2018, much less in 2023, a time when there’s the additional element of CGI on top of the technological advancements. The show had to be adapted for an audience that includes people who have read the novels and a newer generation of viewers that might have certain expectations from an espionage thriller series in the 21st century. Clancy’s version of these stories would be lost in the translation of the adaptation.
In order for the Prime Video series to be a success, it had to appeal to an audience that is largely familiar with Krasinski as Jim Halpert fromThe Officeand as the leading man inA Quiet Place. Cuse also has TV success to boast, having produced other hit shows likeLost,The Strain, andLocke & Key, and Roland produced the Fox hitFringe, among others. When you put these two together to helm a production you have combined showrunning experience of more than 25 years.
Another Clancy adaptation wasWithout Remorsewhich starredMichael B. Jordanand was directed byStefano Sollima,who also madeSicario: Day of the Soldado. It was a worthy entry into the Clancy big-screen canonand is a loosely-based version of the book that was published in 1993. Although John Krasinski’s version of Clancy’s globetrotting hero will be concluding after this season, there is a lot more Tom Clancy material that can be tapped into in the future. Michael B. Jordan is set to star in theWithout RemorsesequelRainbow Six, and a TV adaptation ofSplinter Cellhas been greenlit.
