‘Tracker’ Battles ‘High Potential’ For Most Watched TV Show of 2025

Have you seen stories about ‘Chucky,’ ‘Scream,’ ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ ‘The Boys,’ ‘Vanderpump Rules,’ or any of ‘The Real Housewives’ franchises? That’s probably a Britta DeVore-curated piece of art, and it sounds like you have great taste.

When she isn’t sitting behind her laptop bringing readers her hot takes on upcoming projects or keeping the dream alive in the Senior News team, Britta can usually be found outside hiking or inside behind her drum set. She currently plays in two bands, Kid Midnight and Watergate, both based in Brooklyn. An obsessive traveler, Britta loves long road trips to the South West and has a soft spot in her heart for canyons, rivers, and forests.

She also has a tiny cat named Athena that she loves more than anything else in the world and is always happy for new brewery recs.

The numbers are in, and we officially have a winner for the most-watched entertainment shows of the year. According to a recently released report, CBS’ Tracker is taking a back seat this time around to ABC’s massively successful breakaway procedural, High Potential. But the difference isn’t by much. The calculations for the Justin Hartley-led weekly missing persons drama put it at a total of 16.4 million views across both linear and streaming, while the Kaitlin Olson-fronted crime drama pulled just ahead with 16.5 million views. The numbers come from the 2025 calendar year, which tallies the second half of the 2024-2025 TV season and the first half of the 2025-2026 season. With both productions now heading into their midseason breaks, the competition will pick back up upon their returns next year.

The data shows that other top performers over the last year include CBS’ Matlock and Ghosts as well as its The Big Bang Theory spin-off, Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, and The Good Wife off-shoot, Elsbeth. Over at ABC, High Potential is the clear breakaway winner, but audiences were also keen to tune in for new stories from the worlds of Will TrentThe RookieShifting Gears, and 9-1-1. Lagging behind the competition, NBC only has two titles on the Top 20 list, with Chicago MedChicago Fire, and Chicago P.D. attempting to fight off the competition.

Over the last two-and-a-half seasons, Tracker has been a huge win for CBS, offering audiences something new from your typical run-of-the-mill procedural. Created by Ben H. Winters, the series, which is based on Jeffery Deaver’s novel, The Never Game, follows the work of Hartley’s Colter Shaw, a man with a very specific set of skills that he puts to good use when attempting to find missing persons. The title underwent some massive changes when a handful of principal cast members parted ways with the project at the top of its currently running third season, but it seems like audiences are still eager to join Colter on his weekly hunt, considering the positive numbers from the most recent data collection.

When Does ‘Tracker’ Return?

The first half of Tracker’s third season rounded out just a little bit over one week ago on December 14. The episode in question, “Good Trouble,” saw the leading man get into an incredibly serious car accident alongside fan-favorite recurring character, John Keaton (Brent Sexton). Sadly, fans will have a solid chunk of time to speculate on the outcome of the accident, as the second half of Tracker Season 3 won’t return until March.

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