I have to confess I enjoyed the TV series — Reacher. The big man is fun to watch as he fearlessly takes on all comers and, no matter how outnumbered he is, he always comes out on top — usually after killing a shit load of people. He is tough, he is rule breaker, he is smart, he is cool, he disrespects all authority figures, he speaks softly and carries a big stick. He is everything we imagine our macho men should be. So not terribly realistic but, come on, it can be good television.

Since I liked Reacher, I was willing to take a chance on Neagley. Neagley was a member of Reacher’s crew but now works as a private detective in Chicago. I was skeptical whether Neagley was strong enough character for her own series. She was a good second banana to Reacher but her own show, I don’t know. I needed to be convinced.

Surprisingly the best part of the show is the character of Neagley. Maria Sten does an excellent job of making Neagley a believable but damaged character. The show delves into her tough cold exterior and tries to understand how she got the way. A good portion of the the series involves her trying to figure out why she doesn’t like to be touched. The show also connects her investigation of the death of a friend to her own personal trauma.

Neagley gathers a band of renegades to help her investigate the cult her friend was involved in. All seem foolishly willing to risk their lives trying to get to the bottom of her friend’s death and their back stories are interesting enough to keep me watching. Then, inexplicably, the show goes into a killing spree that defies believe.

It isn’t so much that people are killing and getting killed that is to be expected in a detective show. It is the volume of people engaged in both that becomes a cause for disbelief.

Spoiler Alert: Almost every lead character and important supporting character gets to kill someone at some point. And, even those who are new to murder, take to it with relish by the end. Give them a gun, take them to a shoot out and their guns are blazing away without nary a thought. And so many of the murders happen in front of room full of people. One man is shot in a room full of policeman, the cult members stone one of their leaders at a cult meeting of about 30 people, and a billionaire murders his lackey in front of his staff. No one seems to be much bothered by it.

Supporting characters left and right just remove the bodies. The idea that the leaders of the cult would be OK with testing drugs on their fellow cult members and when these drugs turned deadly, which happened quite frequently, they chopped up the dead bodies, put them into bags and disposed of the evidence. Really? No one thought this was a bad idea. I find that difficult to believe.

Then the Swedish businessman who was paying for the dangerous drug to be tested on these poor cult members decides there is too many witnesses to the cult killings. He decides to kill the entire cult to cover up his excesses. Except he has to hire a para-military group to do the massacre. Isn’t he creating even more witnesses? It just is so unbelievable. There is too many conspirators and too many victims to make this believable.

The villains are all caricatures of villains — the crazy cult leader who sleeps with all the women in the cult and then rubs the cuckold’s nose with their wife’s infidelities, the businessman who cares so much about money that he is willing to kill an entire cult if it stands in his way and a business lackey, so lacking in morals and too willing to please his boss, who incorporates murder into his plans in order to get his product developed. Huh?

You might give it a gander but what started out as a fairly serious investigation of trauma and a person trying to overcome it turns into a cartoonish pile of bodies with villains who twirl their mustaches.