‘Tracker’ Is Best When This Element Takes a Backseat
With Tracker’s first season now wrapped up, it’s clear that the role of “rewardist” Colter Shaw was just the kind of part that Justin Hartley was born to play. With some exciting action moments that pull from his time on Smallville to some meaty character drama that echoes his work on This Is Us, there are a lot of reasons to believe that Tracker is, in many ways, the culmination of Hartley’s career thus far. The actor has masterfully adapted the Jeffrey Deaver character to the screen and given him new life on network television. But there’s one thing in particular about Tracker that makes this show stand out: the masterful balance between the show’s standalone adventures and Colter Shaw’s mysterious history.

‘Tracker’ Excels at Balancing Standalone and Mythology Plots

The longer many procedurals go, the harder it can be to balance the over-arching plot with the specific events of standalone episodes. In the case of many productions (and this is particularly true of genre shows such as The X-Files or Supernatural), elements from the show’s greater mythology will end up bleeding their way into what would’ve otherwise been a standalone story. In our streaming age of serialized television, finding week-by-week productions that tackle new concepts and/or ideas in each episode rather than pulling from the same threads can be challenging. Tracker has been compared to shows like Reacher in the past because of its basic premise, but that comparison ultimately falls short since the Prime Video series takes one Jack Reacher novel and spreads it out over a whole season. Meanwhile, the CBS drama takes us to a new location (and a new mystery) in each episode. And that’s part of why it works so well.
As a sort of anti-procedural, Tracker’s weekly adventures are always engaging, and best reveal more about who Colter Shaw is as a character than anything we’ve learned of his past via flashbacks or family dialogue. This isn’t to say the overarching plotline isn’t important, it certainly is, but Tracker wisely follows the unspoken rules of network television by dragging these ideas out over time and letting fans digest them over longer stretches. Of course, that extends to the characters themselves also, as it gives Colter time to chew on any new information before directly confronting it. For Tracker, that time is vital. When compared to many of the well-produced serialized shows out there, such as Reacher or Jack Ryan, this might make Tracker sound dull on the surface, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even in episodes like “Into the Wild,” which have nothing to do with the show’s central plot, Colter’s near-fatal confrontation with Peter Stormare’s Las Vegas mob enforcer makes the episode as vital and engaging as any other.