Shirtless Justin Hartley Brings a Muscle-Building Look to ‘Tracker’ — But He’s Still the Loneliest Lead Character on CBS
Millions of viewers tuned in after the Super Bowl to watch (or possibly fall into a nacho coma during) Tracker, a new CBS drama that was picked up for a primetime premiere after the game. Basically, those viewers got to see Justin Hartley (This Is Us) play an occasionally shirtless guy with a powerful chin, not named Tracker but Colter Shaw, a freelance search-and-rescue artist. Tracker, well, Colter, is first seen rescuing an injured hiker, far from civilization; later, he finds a kidnapped child. Along the way, he outsmarts bad guys, local cops, and other people whose chins aren’t as well-defined as his. In some ways, this is a standard CBS drama: undemanding, fast-paced, and entertaining. You watch an episode and you’ve got the premise, the characters, and hints of a tragic plot, all of which are fine.
But in some ways, it also feels like a departure from the CBS formula. Typically, network procedurals fall into one of two categories: Either there’s an elite team of cops or cop-like characters, referred to by the acronym (as seen across many NCIS, FBI, and S.W.A.T. shows), or there’s a single Sherlock Holmes-like character who works with the cops, or cop-like characters who have their own skill sets that make them exceptional at solving various cases of the week (as seen in The Equalizer, The Mentalist, or Elementary, where the character is actually Sherlock Holmes). Tracker represents the latter. But there’s something lonelier and more distant about Hartley, even in the vein of the hipster lonerism that inspires contemporary pulp heroes like Jack Reacher. (The Reacher Prime Video show, with its overblown heroism, violence, and sex, is like CBS amped up.) That’s not to say that Colter Shaw abstains from, well, more temporary connections. Aside from Hartley’s constant shirt-striking (Blue Bloods would never! I mean, one assumes; I’m not allowed to watch Blue Bloods because they take up too much parking on my street), the first episode basically establishes that Colter is the type to fall in love and then leave, as evidenced by Rennie (Fiona Rene), a lawyer he once despised who comes to his rescue at one point, and a local cop he beds after successfully returning a kidnapped child before driving off on his next adventure. The semi-nudity and off-screen sex are pretty tame by most standards, but there’s still a sense of something less than CBS’s norm, as if the network (which has been skewing older for decades at this point) is trying to figure out what young people’s sexual appeal looks like.
Which, when combined with this particular Holmesian mythology, is… lonely. Colter Shaw lives in an Airstream, moving from place to place, going wherever he can find work. While it’s somewhat reminiscent of older TV shows like The Fugitive or The Incredible Hulk (or, for that matter, the first season of Peacock’s Poker Face), the sadness of those shows stems from characters who can’t simply go home. Colter seems to live this way by choice, and now Tracker is essentially setting up a CBS procedural version of Nomadland, only this time it’s a supposedly well-off guy looking for seasonal work, rather than someone on the economic fringe. (Hopefully no poop-in-a-bucket scene.) Is this an opportunistic attempt to appeal to a disenfranchised audience, or has CBS’s procedural actually (if still worth watching) alienated itself from society? Of course, some of this isolation could be intentional. It’s easy to imagine the show taking Tracker Colter on an arc toward coming to terms with his past and forming (or recreating) some more lasting relationships. But there’s something a little cold about Hartley’s performance, even as he frequently takes his shirt off, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s Sherlockian arrogance or a more disturbing contempt for those weaker and less forward-looking than he is. On one level, these routines were supposed to be satisfying—and on one level, Tracker was. It also felt vaguely unsatisfying, as if Hartley were waiting for the right moment to completely disengage from the week’s cases.
