Stream or skip: ‘Tracker’ Season 2 on CBS, where Justin Hartley continues to track down missing people for a living Tracker seems like the Platonic ideal of a CBS procedural in the 2020s: An attractive, popular star whose backstory can be explored in the moments between the week’s cases, and a supporting cast that can interact with the main character while revealing bits and pieces about their own characters in the process. So it’s no surprise that the series, which debuted after the Super Bowl last February, has maintained the large audience that watched its first episode and was quickly renewed for a second season.
Opening scene: We see the headlights of a pickup truck. As the truck pulls up, Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) steps out.
Summary: Colter walks into the dark house, pulls out a gun, and makes sure it’s empty. He sees a strange bag of dirt in the freezer. He’s there because today is the anniversary of Gina Pickett’s disappearance, a case he’s been working on for a decade but still hasn’t solved. He believes the guy who lives in that house is responsible, but he can’t blame him. He’s there to remind the guy that he’s still watching.
Back in his Airstream, Colter gets a call from Velma Bruin (Abby McEnany), who’s working with Reenie Greene (Fiona Rene) at Reenie’s new criminal law firm. Velma is separated from her wife Teddi (Robin Weigert, who left the cast as a regular before the season), and distracts herself by working with Reenie and still finding a potential payday for Colter.
Velma tells Colter about a family in Arkansas whose empty car was found in the woods, all four of them gone. Once there, he learns more from the missing mother’s brother (Erik Gow), and wonders why a U.S. Marshal (Enuka Okuma) is investigating. It appears, through research from Colter’s hacker friend Bobby Exley (Eric Graise), that the father has a lot of gambling debt.
It turns out that the father recently won the lottery jackpot, and the Marshal is investigating because there have been a series of robberies of lottery winners recently. While investigating which direction the family might have been led, he sees another Marshal, although he’s wearing shoes that aren’t suitable for searching the woods.
Colter finds the couple’s children, and eventually discovers that the family is in witness protection, with the mother having previously been married to a significant organized crime figure. The lottery win has put them in the public eye, and the ex-wife is pursuing her for turning against the family.
Our Take: Tracker, created by Ben H. Winters and with Elwood Reid as showrunner, continues to capitalize on Hartley’s natural empathy as an actor. While there’s nothing particularly special about Colter each week, the show continues to rely on his ability to connect and mine insights from the people he’s trying to help or testify about that might give him more information.
Reid and his writers have begun to ditch some of the “parts” Colter used to do early in Season 1, like giving odds on something happening, in favor of digging into Colter’s backstory, specifically the death of his survivalist father and how his brother Russell (Jensen Ackles) might be involved. That certainly makes Colter a more flawed character than a guy who spits out odds that he tends to calculate in his head.
Ackles will return in Season 2, as will Hartley’s wife Sofia Pernas as Billie Matalon. But the bulk of the cases will be new weeks, with this season’s continuing story being the unsolved disappearance of Gina Pickett. His ultimate mission to get to the bottom of that case will likely be the driving force behind Colter’s mind-set and evasiveness throughout all of his cases, confident even when law enforcement doubts his abilities or why he’s at the scene.
Yes, each episode requires viewers to suspend disbelief about how Colter managed to get so deeply involved in so many police investigations, but all Hartley has to do is have a heart-to-heart talk with a victim or a victim’s family member, and that disbelief will disappear.
We’re definitely interested in how Weigert’s departure changes the dynamics of Colter’s support group. One of the things we loved about the first season was the chemistry between Hartley and Rene, although we had to suspend disbelief that Reenie would drop everything and go to where Colter was to bail him out of jail or help him get information that only she could have. We weren’t 100% sure that Reenie would always stay with Velma at her new law firm, but those
