'Tracker' Needs a Major Change If It Wants To Remain One of CBS' Biggest Shows

It’s been a few weeks now since Tracker began its new season, and the show has once again hit its stride. Even with all the behind-the-scenes shake-ups regarding production, Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) is back doing what he does best. That’s why we watch the CBS drama, of course, for all the new cases that the reward seeker takes on each year. In fact, it’s because the show has such a clear long-term focus with Colter that it continues to wrestle with the rest of its main cast — and if the show wants to keep them around (and interesting), things need to change fast.

‘Tracker’ Is Struggling to Utilize the Rest of Its Main Cast

When Season 4 began, rather than relocate Reenie Greene (Fiona Rene), Randy Davis (Chris Lee), and Mel Day (Cassady McClincy Zhang) to their new Denver office in the premiere, the audience has been strung along on this “office hunt” plot for several episodes now. “Purification,” the fourth episode in, has finally wrapped that bit up, but it seems like Tracker just has no clue how to handle Colter Shaw’s supporting cast when they’re not in the same room as him. Randy’s role is one thing. After all, he’s the necessary tech genius who can open the digital doors that Colter can’t — without someone like Randy, Colter would be lost without a lead out in the field. We’ve come to accept that Randy, just like Bobby Exley (Eric Graise) before him, is integral to Colter’s reward-seeking operation. Indeed, Tracker was smart to merge Randy and Reenie’s lives together in order to consolidate its main cast rather than keep them separate as independent agents. But just having them in the same room is not enough.

Tracker works because the case changes every week and the four people
solving it never do. Here is which of them you are, what it says about you, and the case for yours
being the best of the four.

You would rather handle it yourself and you are usually capable
of doing so. Colter is a survivalist who lives in an Airstream and takes reward money for
finding missing people, which is a premise that only works because he is clearly running
from something of his own.

• You are competent and self-contained, and the people who love you find both of those
  slightly difficult.
• The show premiered after the Super Bowl in February 2024 and became the most watched new
  drama of that season.
• Justin Hartley came straight off This Is Us into it, which is about as hard a pivot as
  network TV offers.
• Your flaw is that handling everything yourself is a decision, not a personality, and
  people can tell.

You know somebody, and that somebody owes you a favour. Reenie is
the lawyer Colter calls when a case needs a door opened legally, and she is the only person
on the show who can get further with a phone call than he can on foot.

• Your network is your real skill, and you have been quietly building it for years.
• She was promoted to a series regular because the audience responded to her faster than
  anybody planned for.
• Every episode where she takes the lead is an argument that the show should let her do it
  more often.
• Your risk is that being the fixer for everybody leaves nobody fixing things for you.

You are two steps ahead and you rarely mention it. Bobby is the
one who finds the thing that unlocks the case, usually from a desk, usually about ninety
seconds before anybody realises they needed it.

• You do the part of the work nobody sees and you are completely fine with that, mostly.
• Eric Graise brought the character in from the pilot and he has grown into the show’s
  best deadpan.
• Every procedural needs this role and very few of them make it this watchable.
• Your weakness is assuming people have noticed what you did, because they have not.

You turn up, change the temperature of the room, and leave people
arguing about you. Russell is Colter’s brother, ex-military, and the show has never once let
the audience settle on whether he is a help or a problem, which is exactly why he keeps
coming back.

• You are the most interesting person in most rooms and the hardest to plan around.
• Jensen Ackles arrived in the first season and the response was strong enough that CBS
  kept bringing him back.
• Fifteen years of Supernatural means he can play charming and unsettling in the same line
  reading.
• Your flaw is that keeping people guessing is fun for you and tiring for everybody else.

Currently, Reenie and Mel are dancing around a murder mystery plot with no real legs, making it easy to yearn for whatever Colter is out doing whenever the show jumps back to the law office. Admittedly, “Purification” was a slight step in the right direction, as the episode utilized Mel as the one to recognize the medical tag in the photo Colter sent Randy and Reenie to explain to our hero the legalities of the situation. But the show continues to drift with these characters, never really committing to anything terribly substantial or interesting by comparison to Colter’s case. Perhaps the solution is just a matter of doing more of what “Purification” did by giving each cast member a part of Colter’s mystery to solve, but that doesn’t seem sustainable for every episode either. Past seasons have given the Reenie subplot different long-term threads to follow, but they never come to a really satisfying conclusion. Instead, they typically end in an episode divorced from the show’s larger plot with Colter shoehorned in at the eleventh hour to save the day.

Maybe there’s no real fix here. Maybe this is just how Tracker is going to be, with Reenie and Mel trading quips as they juggle both the legal profession and whatever personal issues they have going on (such as Reenie’s recently returned old flame). But considering Tracker has completely overhauled its cast in recent years, writing off everyone who we began this adventure with save for Reenie and Colter, it’s hard to imagine that the show won’t write itself into a corner with its current characters. It was already a strange choice for the show to upgrade Mel to a series regular after successfully slimming the cast down to just Colter, Reenie, and Randy early last season, and now we wonder how sustainable this pivot really is. Mel could be a really interesting character, but right now, the most interesting thing about her continues to be ignored save for a quick tease in “Switchback.”

‘Tracker’ Needs To Strike a Better Balance With Its Subplots

• Image via CBS

• Image via CBS

• Image via CBS

• Image via CBS

• Image via CBS

• Image via CBS

• Image via CBS

• Image via CBS

If Tracker is going to continue long-term, then the CBS series needs to do one of two things. Either it needs to continue to “trim the fat,” so to speak, as it had begun to do at the start of the third season, or it needs to make the rest of the cast more integral to the daily happenings of Colter’s life. In the first two seasons, Reenie was much more involved with Colter’s current caseload and often found ways to meet up with him out in the field. While some of those team-ups were perhaps a stretch (especially considering Reenie’s profession), that doesn’t mean they needed to be done away with entirely. At the very least, there have to be ways that the show can still use Reenie’s legal skills, even if it’s just to help Colter more over the phone. More Reenie isn’t a bad thing; she just needs to be utilized properly — and more importantly, interestingly.

When it comes to the subplots themselves, they’ve always teased a possible connection to what Colter is up to but more often end up entirely divorced from our hero’s main plot — again, the reason folks are watching in the first place. This makes these B-plots a bit of a chore to keep up with, especially when they become convoluted over several episodes, like the Season 3 legal investigation that culminated in “Chain of Custody.” Frankly, they’re just boring compared to what Colter is up to, so if CBS wants to keep its supporting cast around, Tracker needs to find more clever ways for the audience to invest in and care about them. Right now, we’re still watching for Colter, and if the creatives involved ever want us to start tuning in for anyone outside the Shaw family (although Randy is probably safe here), then the show needs to start throwing its other characters a meatier bone.

Tracker airs Sundays on CBS and is available for streaming the next day on Paramount+.