Tracker

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Rewardist

I have a weakness for road shows. Give me someone living out of a vehicle, rolling into a new town every week to solve a problem and disappear before the credits, and I’m halfway in already. That old American TV shape—*The Fugitive*, *The Rockford Files*, all that dust-and-motel DNA—still works on me. *Tracker* knows it too. Ben H. Winters takes Jeffery Deaver’s *The Never Game* and turns it into unabashed Dad TV, only polished enough for CBS and just odd enough to stay awake. I can’t pretend I mind.

Colter Shaw calls himself a rewardist, which is the sort of label television can only sell if the actor commits. He’s not a cop, not exactly a PI either. He tracks down missing people for money and operates out of a gleaming Airstream trailer, drifting from case to case like a professional ghost.



The weekly mysteries are serviceable, sometimes better than that, sometimes hilariously odd—I’m still not fully over the alien-conspiracy detour. But the reason the show works at all is Justin Hartley. After six seasons of Kevin Pearson on *This Is Us*, with all the chatter and self-involved panic that role required, watching Hartley clamp down into Colter is genuinely interesting. He strips the performance almost bare. Colter doesn’t waste movement. He doesn’t bolt if a walk will do. He doesn’t raise his voice when a low, steady sentence can get the job done. The show gets a surprising amount of mileage out of that physical calm.

That said, the writers don’t always seem sure how much silence they can trust. The big serialized backstory—Colter’s survivalist father, the fractured family, the whole dark knot of childhood damage—keeps pushing against the breezier case-of-the-week format. Sometimes the two modes complement each other. Sometimes it feels like the show is trying to drag a trauma saga through a perfectly decent missing-person procedural. More often than not, I catch myself wanting less mythology and more of this guy quietly finding people in the woods.



Where *Tracker* really finds its rhythm is in Colter’s confrontations. He corners somebody on a trail, or at a roadside property, or in some patch of wilderness that looks like trouble, and instead of swaggering or reaching for a gun, he starts calculating odds. He tells people their chances. He talks them down with percentages. It’s a funny little character detail, but it also gives the show a specific pulse. As Terry Terrones wrote in *Paste Magazine*, "Whether dryly cracking a joke, bantering with his team, taking down bad guys, or sharing a heartfelt story about his unusual childhood, Colter feels like a fully formed person." That’s the trick: he’s competent without turning into a machine.



The show also wisely refuses to let him be a complete island. Reenie Green, played by Fiona Rene, keeps tugging him back toward actual human interaction. As his lawyer and occasional moral speed bump, she brings just enough sharpness and impatience to stop Colter from blending into the scenery. Their scenes add friction the series badly needs.

Three seasons in, *Tracker* still isn’t trying to reinvent anything. Good. It doesn’t have to. It’s a procedural about a capable person going someplace difficult and making the situation less broken. On some nights, that’s more than enough.