Jack Ryan serves as the American hero for a new generation

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is not only a top-notch thriller, but it’s given TV fans a new American hero to rally behind in John Krasinski’s title character.

Move over, Jack Bauer — and make way for Jack Ryan.

Amazon has struck gold with Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, which quickly established itself as the best thriller everyone should be watching. It’s improved on the original novels, blown the various movie versions out of the water, and now in its second season is a true nail-biter. They don’t make shows like this very often, and they haven’t since 24 hit the airwaves in 2001.

But Jack Ryan shows how far TV, and the world it depicts, have come in the almost two decades since then.

24 remains one of the best dramas of all time; it’s one of only five shows in TV history to have earned an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe and a Satellite Award for Best Drama Series. And part of what made it so great was that it was also a product of its time.

The series arrived less than a month after 9/11, and it proved to be right on the nose, if not ahead of the curve, on a number of topics. It showcased an African-American Presidential candidate six years before Barack Obama announced his candidacy. It featured a discussion of the Russian and U.S. relationship well before it became a hot news item (again). It explored just about every permutation of terrorism, thanks in part to having nine seasons plus a TV-movie and a follow-up miniseries.

And it also gave us Jack Bauer, who was exactly the fictional hero we needed. Bauer came onto the small screen at a time when our country was reeling and was established as an upstanding, hard-working government agent who would do literally whatever it took to save the country. As those seasons went on, he took more punishment and pushed more limits, but he was a character we always knew was trying to do the right thing — and never stopped trying in a time when viewers wanted to feel the good guys were winning.

Skip ahead 18 years later, and while 24 remains a great piece of television, it’s passed that baton on to Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.

As wonderfully portrayed by John Krasinski, Jack Ryan is another American hero that we can all get behind. But the world he lives in, the way he fights for our country, and who he is are all different now. Just like 24, Jack Ryan is a series uniquely tailored for where we are now, and that’s why it’s must-watch TV.

Ryan is a character who operates primarily with his brain instead of his brawn; he begins the first season as a CIA analyst and then gets pulled into the field. Even when he’s in the thick of the hunt, he’s still more of an intellectual than a pure soldier. The second season begins with Ryan having turned down a high-profile job in Moscow and instead lecturing a room full of analysts and doing work with the State Department.

Not that he’s not capable of kicking butt — he does that plenty of times — but it’s not his first or only option. In a world where there’s more scrutiny, he’s just as capable of figuring or talking his way through a situation as he is fighting his way out.

Jack Ryan also paints a different picture of the villains. Its depiction of terrorism in the first season was much more nuanced and three-dimensional than any other series. While there was no doubt who the antagonists were, it didn’t paint with a broad brush. It showed extremism, but it also portrayed a terrorist leader’s wife (the excellent Dina Shihabi) who was horrified by her husband’s actions and fought valiantly to get herself and her children to safety.

Likewise, season 2 is about politically motivated violence and a potentially failed state, where the primary opposing force is the Venezuelan president and his network of associates who have been driving the country into the ground. There’s a story there, too, about the Venezuelan people and how they’re trying to rise up on their own before Ryan and company ever come into the picture. At a time when U.S. viewers have their own dissatisfaction with their president, we’re given a story about questionable authority, civil unrest, and what it means to belong to a nation.

The writers and producers are telling stories with context, stories that resonate with aspects of our culture, and that are bigger than just Jack Ryan coming in to save the day. That storytelling is a reflection of the greater big-picture awareness we’ve gained in the last two decades.

Here’s another big-picture aspect to get excited about: like Jack Bauer, Jack Ryan is being allowed to markedly evolve season to season and often episode to episode. Kiefer Sutherland won an Emmy and a Golden Globe playing Bauer, who started as a white knight and ended up jaded, broken and somewhere in Russia. John Krasinski is a future Emmy winner as Ryan, who’s now going through that same hero’s journey, although hopefully, it ends differently.

His interpretation of Ryan is more three-dimensional and vulnerable than even Clancy’s novels, the first of which was published in 1987 and which could often paint a romanticized picture of the military and CIA. Krasinki’s character is naive, sometimes even stupidly flawed. Season 2 sees him make a massive error in judgment involving a German agent that even viewers know is dumb. But he’s allowed to fail, and frankly he should because he’s not a career soldier or a natural hero.

Audiences are watching him grow: he’s lost his naivete, his clean-cut look, and his original love interest already. As he affects change in the world, we see the effects of that change on him. And in that way, he reflects where we are today. He’s telling us what it means to be a hero today and what the world looks like in this decade. And that’s the kind of timely, thought-provoking, and electrifying drama we’ve been missing.

To quote Kiefer Sutherland, “Real human beings given extraordinary circumstances do some heroic things.” That’s what Jack Bauer did in the 2000s, and that’s what Jack Ryan is doing now.

Jack Ryan season 2 is now streaming on Amazon Prime. Find the latest Deeper Cut every Wednesday in the Entertainment category at FanSided.