Fights, money and breaking the rules: The unstoppable rise of Dad TV

Alan Ritchson in Reacher. Photo / Amazon Prime

They don't ask deep questions about the meaning of life. There is little romance. And there are certainly no bonnets or grand society balls. But even though shows like Billions or Blue Bloods or The Boys receive virtually no press and even less critical acclaim, they have a large, loyal audience. And that audience can be summed up in one word: dads.

So successful have such shows become, in fact, that a new streaming service is about to launch in the UK aimed fairly and squarely at the middle-aged man who wants to watch TV about money, shooting and breaking the rules. Paramount+ will be the home of the entire Mission Impossible film franchise, a mini-series about the making of The Godfather and a drama based on the 2001 video game Halo.

But the definitive piece of Dad TV can be seen right now on Amazon Prime. Reacher, an adaptation from Lee Child's Jack Reacher books and leagues ahead of the Tom Cruise movie adaptations (Jack Reacher is first and foremost meant to be huge, after all), is hard power in human form. The fight scenes are better choreographed than a Strictly finale, the plot steams on relentlessly and the lead character hardly ever speaks. I'd venture it has a 34-50 female audience in the high single-figures.

Other classic examples of Dad TV are Vikings, Narcos, Bosch and Gangs of London. In fact, considering how central fighting is to Dad TV, it's a miracle, for example, that the collected works of Antony Beevor haven't yet been made in to an Apple TV+ $200 million major limited series event called "Reasons Why Men Fight A Lot" (press red button for added fighting). The idea that some of the fighting you're watching is or was real, or even preserved in a cod-historical mythology (see Peaky Blinders), also plays well on channel Dad.

Add some espionage ("this actually happened but it was secret") and you reach Dad TV nirvana. James Bond is, of course, the archetype (espionage plus fighting against a quasi-realistic – MI6 – backdrop), but Bond films only come out every few years. So other programme-makers have stepped in to fill the breach.

American showrunner Taylor Sheridan is the godfather of the genre. A good ol' Texas boy, Sheridan began as an actor on the FX biker show Sons of Anarchy but has really hit paydirt with Yellowstone, a family drama set on a Montana cattle ranch starring Kevin Costner. It's proved such a big hit in the US that a prequel, 1883, has already launched and eight further Sheridan dramas, often involving cowboys, are in the works, many of which are expected to be shown on the aforementioned Paramount+.

Alexander Ludwig as Bjorn in Vikings. Photo / Lightbox

Escapism also goes down well with dads. That can be historical (a long time ago in a galaxy far far away) or it can be literal. Lots of Dad TV follows men who say "to hell with it" and set out on the kind of journey (see Breaking Bad) that, secretly, all men stuck at home reading The Gruffalo for the thousandth time would like to do.

And of course there's sport, the traditional preserve of the armchair-ensconced dad. New to the Dad TV genre is the big sports drama, a trend that takes the in-depth documentaries that have held sway in the past few years like The Last Dance and Amazon's All or Nothing, and gives them some HBO-style dramatic pizzazz. The forthcoming Winning Time: the Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is an absolute Dad TV slam dunk.

To be clear, however, in spite of general critical opprobrium, Dad TV is more than just the small-screen equivalent of The Expendables 3. Dads have evolved and so has their TV sustenance. The money and writing talent in TV these days means that even series like Reacher or Gangs of London come with wit, shrewd plotting, high production values and plenty of visual flair.

But crucial to the proliferation of Dad TV is the way these programmes are being watched, too. Dad TV has become pretty much a solo activity, generally undertaken when your partner's gone to bed, left the house or just left you. Technology also means dads can do their viewing on the commute, or can squeeze in a particularly gnarly fight sequence while waiting for the bin lorry.

Then, once the bin lorry's gone and you're safely installed in your new garden studio doing a bit of flexi-working, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime or iPlayer all grant you the ability to carry on right where you left off.

In some ways, Dad TV is a rejoinder to the male stereotype that held sway on television shows in the 1990s and 2000s. Principally, this was men such as Robert Lindsay in My Family, Ty Burrell's dad in Modern Family and Ross in Friends – feeble, bumbling milquetoasts who couldn't hold a pen the right way round and needed a woman at hand to even consider putting on their own trousers.

Around the early 2000s, with the influx of male screenwriters to television, TV started showing more aspirational male role models. Hopefully Tony Soprano, Walter White and Stringer Bell, drug dealers and murderers as they were, weren't too aspirational, but television's 21st-century golden age was launched on a wave of male anti-heroes who were tough yet also neurotic, capable of good choices and daft ones, ubermensches one moment, fallible the next.

That set the tone for television that showed believable, older male characters, and it has been gobbled up by real older men – dads, essentially – at home. It was only a question of the technology catching up so that families as individuals could pick and choose their own TV schedule, and Dad controlling the remote was back. It's just now the remote is your phone in your pocket, and you grab your telly time late at night, on headphones or when the baby finally sleeps.

The pick of Dad TV shows

Yellowstone
My5
Kevin Costner-led Montana family saga that has made log cabin mansions as sought after as penthouse suites.

Reacher
Amazon Prime Video
"He's cool, he's calm, he'll break your f****** arm." But Amazon's adaptation of Lee Child's novels is clever as well as violent, and Alan Ritchson is Jack Reacher.

Banshee
Sky Go/NOW
Small-town (Dads like small towns) US action drama from 2013 with a cult (i.e. Dad) following. Sex, violence and nasty locals, but witty too.

Legion
Amazon Prime Video
Off-the-charts bizarre superhero drama starring Dan 'Downton' Stevens as a schizophrenic with 'mutant' powers.

Hatfields and McCoys
Apple TV+
America's most notorious family feud brought to life with Kevin Costner (again) and Bill Paxton in a historical drama set just after the Civil War. Dads like stetsons, okay?

Resident Alien
Sky Go/NOW
Quirky sci-fi comedy about a crash-landing alien (Alan Tudyk) sent to destroy humanity who takes on the identity of a small-town doctor.

See
Apple TV+
Apple TV+ launched with this post-apocalyptic drama from Steven "Peaky Blinders" Knight about a dystopia in which humans have all lost the power of sight.

And three coming soon...

Masters of the Air
Apple TV+
Epic HBO World War II drama from the makers of Band of Brothers documents America's air war against Nazi Germany.

SAS: Rogue Heroes
BBC One
Steven Knight (again) tells the story of the creation of the SAS – Jack O'Connell and Connor Swindells star.

Halo
Paramount+
The X-Box franchise many a dad grew up playing becomes a TV show. Pablo Schreiber plays a genetically-engineered super soldier.