I loved “Hunt for Red October,” the first Jack Ryan movie. Alec Baldwin is a fine actor who filled the role nicely, and it had Sean Connery as the best Scottish-accented Soviet sub commander, and also Fred Thompson who smoked cigarettes and said things with flat dismay. A great movie. The subsequent movies had Indiana Jones as Jack Ryan, right? Were there others? Doesn’t quite matter – the character isn’t rooted in a particular actor, and doesn’t have many attributes aside from “CIA data dude who can also shoot people in the head if need be.” Amazon made a Jack Ryan series a few years ago, starring Jim from “The Office” and Bunk from “The Wire,” and it was pretty good: the Islamist terrorist was the bad guy, not a front for a shadowy group of businessmen fronted by Jon Voight, as happened all the time in “24.”

This new season is taking some flak for its rearrangement of reality: it’s set in Venezuela, which is run by a sleek, manicured dude named Nicholas who is . . . a nationalist! Heavy right-wing vibes. His domestic political opponent is . . . a Social Justice candidate! The young kids who are opposed to the government are described by one exasperated character as “leftists.” In other words: Bizarro World.