After more than two decades of playing supporting characters in large ensembles, Justin Hartley is venturing out on his own and entering a new point in his career. The self-described journeyman actor is the star and executive producer of “Tracker,” a series that’s a throwback to classic private-eye shows from the 1970s and ’80s, and it premieres in a prime slot — after the Super Bowl on Sunday.
Based on Jeffery Deaver’s bestselling novel “The Never Game,” the new CBS drama series that’s produced by 20th Television follows Hartley’s Colter Shaw, a reward-seeking, lone-wolf survivalist who roams the U.S. in an Airstream and uses his expert tracking skills to help crack mysteries for private citizens and law enforcement. But while he may help other people get closure, Colter is forced to reckon with a mystery of his own: the circumstances that led to the suspicious death of his father, for which he believes his estranged brother should be held responsible.
The role is a dramatic departure from Hartley’s star-making turn as Kevin Pearson in the NBC drama “This Is Us,” in which he played the eldest of three siblings born on the same day who form the series’ emotional core. The acclaimed series, which wrapped in 2022, earned nearly 40 Emmy nominations over its six seasons.
“I wasn’t specifically looking for this genre, but it is nice to do something that is uber-different from what you’ve been doing,” Hartley says on a recent Zoom call from Vancouver, where he is shooting the first season of “Tracker.”
During the final season of “This Is Us,” Hartley and executive producer and director Ken Olin began discussing their next collaboration. They did not have a specific genre in mind, but they agreed that their next project would have to be character and story-driven. Once they came across “The Never Game” in early 2021, Hartley optioned the property and worked with Olin to develop a series.
Olin says he originally noticed a striking resemblance between Hartley and the description of Colter, which made him believe that the role would be a perfect fit.
“He was this great-looking guy who looks like an actor, but he goes into these places. He’s emotionally more complex than you think. He’s always underestimated in terms of his abilities and how shrewd he is,” he says.
The series is in the same vein as “The Rockford Files,” “Mannix,” “Baretta” and “Kojak” — shows with eccentric, idiosyncratic leads that Olin says he grew up watching on television.
“What I loved about it was, it’s a way of doing a P.I. show that didn’t require rebooting something,” Olin says. “It can have some of the traditional DNA of a P.I. show, but the character himself has a very contemporary psychological background. One of the great things that we loved about it was he’s free to move around, and he doesn’t have to adhere to all of the limitations of law enforcement.”
Hartley says his character uses old-school tracking techniques to find what he’s looking for.
“We have to really be careful to go, ‘Well, why doesn’t he just use his phone?’ So our writers have to be clever enough to figure out reasons why you wouldn’t or couldn’t in that situation,” he says.
And unlike most procedurals, where a skilled team is usually assembled to help solve a case or respond to a call, Hartley says, “Colter pretty much is alone a lot.”
“I love the idea that his backstory and his family history dictates the way that he behaves in that regard, in that he’s gun-shy of commitment [and] he’s really cautious of other people,” he says. “I just haven’t seen anything like that where a guy roams from town to town and does all of that by himself, and he’s really bound by nothing.”
