When it was originally announced that CBS was doing a series based on the main character from Jeffrey Deaver’s novel The Never Game, it was called The Never Game, which made sense.
Every now and then, a network takes a swing at delivering the next iconic lone wolf action hero. With CBS’ ‘Tracker’, the pitch is clear: take the rugged, resourceful vibe of Jack Reacher, sprinkle in some This Is Us fanfare, and throw him into the wild west of gig-economy survival work. But does it actually work? Or does it miss the mark? Let’s dive deep into this high-paced yet oddly forgettable procedural and see whether Justin Hartley‘s latest project hits home—or just checks boxes.
Several months later, CBS announced that the series, created by Ben H. Winters, was changing its title to Tracker, a name that I rather consistently confuse with Amazon’s Lee Child series, Reacher. This also makes sense and, in fact, borders on ideal for CBS. With Reacher following recent streaming protocol and producing eight-episode seasons that can air “whenever the pieces come together,” there is probably an audience appetite for a cut-rate version — a series that delivers a lot of the same lizard-brain pleasures on a broadcast schedule capable of producing 15 or even 22 episodes of lone-wolf vigilante justice in easily digestible 41-minute weekly morsels.
So if you accept that Tracker isn’t exactly Reacher 2.0, but it’s close enough to offer the equivalent laundry-folding diversion, it has virtues even if, as a TV show, it’s beyond forgettable. Two days after watching the first four Tracker installments, I can barely remember a single standalone plot, much less the overall series mythology, which is much less interesting than the show seems to believe it is. But in Justin Hartley, Tracker has a solid action leading man, even if thus far the series hasn’t come close to tapping into any of the things that made Hartley so effective for six seasons on This Is Us.
Hartley plays Colter Shaw — “Colter,” like “Tracker,” has that appealing “Reacher” mouth-feel, coincidentally or not — a so-called “rewardist.” This means that Colter, who travels the Northwest in a macho GMC truck lugging a shiny Airstream trailer behind him, uses a particular set of skills — accumulated through his childhood with a paranoid survivalist father — to collect rewards for tracking down missing people and solving basic mysteries of that ilk.
Like Jack Reacher, Colter is a roaming samurai who can’t avoid attracting attention with his size and his lack of interest in working with local law enforcement. Like Jack Reacher, Colter is drawn to trouble. And even when he isn’t, trouble finds him. Like Jack Reacher, Colter frequently encounters female “characters” whose names he barely learns before he beds them and moves along to the next town.
Unlike Jack Reacher, Colter has a team behind him, even if he works alone in the field. In Teddi (Robin Weigert) and Velma (Abby McEnany), he has a pair of dispatchers who spend all of their time at home with their rescue pets and pottery, but occasionally supply Colter with assignments and basic research. Bobby (Eric Graise) is an expert hacker who… finds things on the Internet but, thankfully, has yet to make a single reference to “The Dark Web” in the episodes I’ve seen.
So far, Colter has only interacted with these characters via phone. That’s not the case with Reenie (Fiona Rene), an attorney who seems to have the time and resources to fly to wherever Colter happens to be in order to bail him out of jail — local law enforcement tends to chafe at his renegade ways — and generally bust his balls for that one time they slept together and he didn’t call or something. In an ideal world, they would have will-they-or-won’t-they chemistry since Reenie looks at Colter like she’s a cat and he’s a mouse. But he looks at her like a female “character” whose name he barely learned before they had a one-night-stand and he moved along to the next town.
Justin Hartley’s Colter Shaw had the potential to become TV’s next unforgettable lone wolf, but ‘Tracker’ plays it too safe. It’s fast-moving, visually polished, and decently acted—but lacks the spark that makes a series binge-worthy. If you’re in the mood for something light, it works. But if you’re hunting for a thrilling new obsession? Keep tracking.
