Do you ever feel like we're all just… lost? Imagine if there was a show about a man who found us
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In one way, Tracker , the new CBS drama premiering after the Super Bowl, is perhaps the most generic procedural ever devised. It stars a blandly charming white guy (Justin Hartley of This Is Us fame to most, Smallville fame to me) who makes a living finding missing people and collecting reward money, using his skills as a survivalist to travel the country and notice things that others do. 't, charm a local policeman or doctor on the way. On the surface, Tracker is about as generic as network dramas come, the smoothest 42 minutes you can spend between commercials screaming WHOPPER WHOPPER WHOPPER WHOPPER or listing drug side effects. But I find Tracker fascinating, actually, based entirely on what it's not about.
Colter Shaw (yes, that's his name) is notably not a cop, nor a detective. He calls himself, quite seriously, "a rewardist" – because he tracks down missing persons for reward money, which he always collects. This gives Tracker's protagonist a mercenary edge that the show isn't particularly interested in exploring; he is very clear in it for the money but also a nice guy who wants to get involved and help people, as long as they can pay. Colter's civilian status is also unquestioned – since he's not a cop, the people he questions on his journey to find the missing person in that episode have no real reason to cooperate with him, especially if they're involved in some crime.
But then again: Shaw has no superlative skills to display or quirky character quirks to help him navigate such roadblocks. He's not a spiky Sherlock Holmes type, nor does he have an unusual talent like instantly knowing when someone is lying or rigging elaborate contraptions out of pantry items. In Tracker, things only work out for Colter, because if they didn't, the show would stop in its tracks.
