Colter Shaw is back on the case. And things are only going to get more dramatic, more intense, and more exciting when Tracker, one of the most popular TV series, returns for Season 2 on CBS.
Last season, TV audiences were introduced to the private investigator who uses his keen observation skills to track down missing people for reward money. Author Jeffery Deaver created the character in his 2019 novel The Never Game, which executive producers Elwood Reid and Ken Olin adapted into Tracker and cast former This Is Us actor Justin Hartley as the eponymous finder.
While Deaver’s novel is a direct inspiration for the series, Tracker is taking Colter in their own direction. They’re using the emotion of the novel to inspire TV chapters of Colter’s story, not necessarily the blueprint.
“As a source material, I think what Jeffrey Deaver set out to do was the factory setting. The spirit of the characters is in that book. We kept going back and talking about that in the room,” Elwood Reid told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “This guy has all these skills that normally don’t have any application in everyday life but in his world, they’re a big deal.”
And that world is getting bigger. Both Reid and Olin, along with Justin Hartley, are excited to take the audience on an even wilder adventure in the show’s second season.
Going bigger in Season 2 is no easy task, considering how big Tracker was to begin with. CBS gave the series a coveted post-Super Bowl time slot last February, and it paid off with 18 million viewers for the first episode. Obviously, viewership numbers dropped after the big game, but Tracker still ended the season with over 7 million viewers for its finale, which was a great showing and made scoring a second season easy for CBS.
“It’s great to put something out there and work hard on something and know that other people think it’s really great,” Hartley said. “We’re entertainers, right? It makes me feel really good about my job to know that people who are busy and have something going on are going to take an hour to watch our show.”
Naturally, the creative team and Hartley want to reward fans with great television every week, and they feel more prepared to do so in Season 2 because they don’t have to deal with a tight deadline due to the 2023 Hollywood strike. “This year will be better. After the strike, we had to go into production. We only had about a third of the time to prep for Justin. “Elwood had to put in the script because otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to find the right [filming] location,” Olin explains. “This year, even in the first episode, there’s a quality to the breaking down of the bad things he’s doing and the combination of the emotional quality of his character.”
“There’s an old-fashioned seriousness to the character, along with a personal mission that he has about his personal life. I know we’re at CBS, and there are a lot of procedurals where they say, ‘Here’s a dead body, and we’re going to find out who killed your husband, wife, child, or whoever,’ ‘I’m going to go save this person.’ That makes sense.” “I think that makes a big difference,” Reid explains. “There’s just something about this guy going to a different place where he doesn’t know anyone, learning about the culture of a place, and then trying to solve a case.”
The fresh air also helps, Olin adds. Instead of interrogating people in a police station or hanging around a morgue, Colte
