Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tracker’ Season 2 On CBS, Where Justin Hartley Continues To Find Missing People For A Living
racker seems like the Platonic ideal of a CBS procedural in the 2020s: An appealing, well-known star whose character’s backstory that can be explored in the moments between cases of the week, and a support team that can interact with the central character while revealing crumbs of their own characters in the process. It’s not a surprise, then that the series, which debuted after the Super Bowl last February, maintained a lot of the massive audience that watched the pilot and earned a quick second season renewal.
TRACKER SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: We see the headlights of a pickup truck. When the truck stops, Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) gets out.
The Gist: Colter goes in the darkened house, pulls out his gun, and makes sure it’s empty. He sees a curious bag of dirt in the freezer. He’s there because it’s the anniversary of Gina Pickett’s disappearance, a case he’s been working on for a decade but hasn’t solved. He’s convinced that the guy who lives in that house is responsible, but still can’t pin it on him. He’s there to remind the guy he’s still watching.
Back in his Airstream, Colter gets a call from Velma Bruin (Abby McEnany), who is now working with Reenie Greene (Fiona Rene) at Reenie’s new criminal law practice. Velma is separated from her wife Teddi (Robin Weigert, who departed the cast as a regular before the season), and distracts herself by working with Reenie and still finding potential paydays for Colter.
Velma tells Colter about a family in Arkansas whose empty car was found in a wooded area, with all four of them gone. When he gets there, he finds out more from the brother of the missing mom (Erik Gow) and wonders why a US Marshal (Enuka Okuma) is investigating. It also seems like, via research from Colter’s hacker buddy Bobby Exley (Eric Graise), the dad had a lot of gambling debts.
It turns out that the dad recently won a lottery jackpot, and the Marshal is investigating because there have been a string of robberies of recent lottery winners. While looking into just what direction the family might have been taken in, he sees another Marshal, albeit one wearing shoes inappropriate for searching through the woods.
Colter finds the couple’s children, and what he ends up finding out is that the family is in witness protection, with the mom having been previously married to a significant organized crime figure. The lottery win flushed them out in the public eye, and the ex is coming after her for turning against the family.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Tracker is in the same vein as other current CBS procedurals like The Equalizer.
Our Take: Tracker, created by Ben H. Winters, with Elwood Reid as the showrunner, continues to take advantage of Hartley’s natural empathy as an actor. Despite the fact that there’s nothing particularly special about the cases Colter takes each week, the show continues to ride on Colter being able to connect and draw out details from the people that he’s trying to help or witnesses that might give him more information.
Reid and his writers did start to lay off some of the “bits” that Colter used to do early in Season 1, like giving the odds of something happening, in favor of leaning into Colter’s backstory, especially the death of his survivalist father and how his brother Russell (Jensen Ackles) might be involved. It certainly made Colter more of a flawed character than a guy who verbalizes the odds that he tends to calculate in his head.
Ackles will be back in Season 2, as will Hartley’s wife Sofia Pernas as Billie Matalon. But, for the most part the cases will be new week, with this season’s continuing story being about Gina Pickett’s unsolved disappearance. His quest to finally get to the bottom of that case will likely be what’s driving Colter to brood and skirt the law through all of his cases, confident even in the face of law enforcement doubting his abilities or reasons for being around the crime scene.
Yes, each episode requires the viewer to suspend disbelief over just how Colter can manage insinuate himself so deeply into 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 goes away.
We’re definitely interested in how Weigert’s departure changes the dynamic of Colter’s support team. One of the things we liked about the first season was the chemistry between Hartley and Rene, though we had to again suspend disbelief that Reenie could just drop everything and travel to where Colter was to bail him out of jail or help him obtain information that only she can get. We’re not 100% sure that Reenie will always be hanging back with Velma in her new law office, but the banter between Reenie and Colter isn’t quite the same over FaceTime as it is when the two are sharing physical space.
