Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tracker’ On CBS, Where Justin Hartley Is A Man Who Tracks Missing People For A Living
Networks have been reluctant to launch new series after the Super Bowl in recent years, mainly because most of those new series tend to get a big audience that drops like a rock after the audience has gotten a look at the heavily-promoted pilot. But in Tracker, which airs after CBS’s broadcast of Super Bowl LVIII, they have as much of a sure thing as any new show could be. One of the big reasons is that its star, Justin Hartley, is coming off one of the few non-procedural network hits from the past decade.
TRACKER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: From the perspective of someone regaining consciousness, we see three versions of a man’s face slowly come together. “You’re going to survive,” he says.
The Gist: Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) is the man who is telling the woman he’s kneeling over that she’s going to survive. She’s been missing for a few days after getting off track on a hike, falling, and injuring her leg. Colter, who makes a living by finding missing people and collecting the reward being offered — he calls himself a “rewardist” — gives the woman percentages of her or her leg surviving a wait for a helicopter versus letting him stabilize her leg and carry her out of the rocky terrain. She chooses the latter, and Colter presses her husband for the $50,000 her parents were offering.
But Colter isn’t just about the reward — though he makes a steady living from what he does, because as he says, “everyone’s looking for something.” He takes the lessons his father Ashton (Lee Tergesen) taught him when it comes to tracking people and uses them in his work. One of the main ones is “don’t let panic take the wheel.”
Colter travels all over the country tracking people, towing the Airstream he lives in with him wherever he goes. A married couple, Velma and Teddi Bruin (Abby McEnany, Robin Weigert), find him new reward offers that he can pursue; the next one is in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where a 14-year-old boy was last seen with his non-custodial father.As he investigates where the boy might be, he enlists the aid of a hacker named Bob Exley (Eric Graise) to get text messages between the boy and his estranged father, which points him to a fast food joint. There, he busts into the back office to look at the security footage, which gets him arrested by local police.
At the station, he tries to convince a patrol officer, Officer Amini (Paniz Zade) to track down the man the teen met at the burger joint, because it wasn’t his father. Velma and Teddi find an attorney to get him out of lockup; it’s Reenie Greene (Fiona Rene), who is still smarting from Colter blowing her off romantically after they connected the last time she had to get him out of legal trouble.
All the while, Colter is getting texts and phone calls from someone from his past who wants to be heard out. As he explains his career choice to Amini, we find out that a family tragedy may or may not have been caused by his older brother Russell (Matthew Nelson-Mahood in the flashbacks) after their Berkeley-professor parents took the family off the grid 20 years prior.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Tracker certainly has the DNA of many of CBS’s procedural shows, like Elementary and The Equalizer, but also carries some old-school DNA, reminding us a bit of shows like The Rockford Files.
Our Take: The commercials for Tracker make the show feel like just about any generic CBS procedural, albeit one featuring one of the stars of This Is Us. But upon watching the pilot, there’s a bit more depth to the show than it seems to have at first, and a lot of that is thanks to Hartley.
The show is produced by Ken Olin (who directs the first two episodes), Ben H. Winters and showrunner Elwood Reid (Big Sky); Hartley is also an executive producer. Olin worked with Hartley extensively on This Is Us, and he knows just what made Hartley so appealing on that hit show; he was vulnerable with a natural acting style that connects directly with the viewer. That’s exactly the style Hartley deploys as Colter Shaw.
He’s not trying to act like this know-it-all tracker guy; he’s got issues and they’re right there on his face as he tracks down the people he’s trying to find. Yes, there are the usual procedural ticks to his character, like when he doles out percentages or says things like “a reward becomes a binding contract at the moment of success.” But for the most part, Hartley plays Colter as the same warm, personable guy that Kevin Pearson was on his previous show.
There is definitely a backstory for Colter that will inform his cases, which is a trend we’ve seen in CBS procedurals over the past decade or so. The dispute with his older brother will be roiling in the background for the entire season, and it seems like we’ll see lots of flashbacks to 20 years prior to show just how Colter came to become this nomadic loner who is excellent at his job.
What we wonder is if the idea that he’s going to roll into a town and need to convince law enforcement to work with him to find someone is going to get tiresome. We also want to know more about Velma and Teddi, given that we do get to see their home life as they essentially act as Colter’s handlers. Who are they in relation to Colter and just how did they come around to this arrangement with him? Given how appealing we’ve found McEnany and Weigert in the past, and they have a good chemistry in the scenes they’re in together, we’re definitely on board to find out more about them.
Sex and Skin: It’s a broadcast network show. Any sex or skin will be more implied than anything else, like when Velma and Teddi find him sleeping next to someone when they call him about the next case.
Parting Shot: Colter goes to the cabin where he grew up to see his mother, Mary Dove Shaw (Wendy Crewson). He tells her that Russell has been trying to get in touch. She tells him in no uncertain terms to block the number and not get in contact. Colter gets in his pickup and drives off, towing the Airstream.
Sleeper Star: Fiona Rene is funny as Reenie Greene, who seems to have an undeniable attraction to Colter that she just hates that she has. Her monologue to explain how they know each other was a little drawn out, but she handled it well.
Most Pilot-y Line: Near the end of the episode, Colter is shot in the shoulder. There are times that he’s holding it, trying to stanch bleeding and acting like it’s disabled, but there are other times when he’s running and using the shoulder like nothing is wrong with it. We get the whole adrenaline thing, but just be consistent with it, know what we mean?
