Is This TV’s Next Wandering Rural Hero?

By Keith Roysdon

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.

It seems like wide open spaces are irresistible to the makers of TV shows. We’ve seen “Longmire,” “Joe Pickett,” and “Big Sky” – not to mention the “Yellowstone” phenomenon – all capture a place in our national attention span, at least for a little while.

We’ll see if “Tracker,” a CBS series about a survivalist and finder of lost people has a similar impact.

When Westerns were the kings of TV in the 1950s and 1960s, we could watch endless stories played out against a backdrop of mountains, deserts, and frontier towns. Before the Lone Ranger or Matt Dillon or the cowboys of “The Virginian” rode off into the sunset, they and dozens of other shows reinforced the idea of the frontier for modern audiences.

There’s appeal for many in the idea of getting away from “civilization,” at least until roughing it gets a little too rough. One of my favorite elements of the Craig Johnson books that the “Longmire” series is based on is that characters must stand in one particular spot in town to get a cellphone signal. In “Yellowstone,” Kevin Costner’s John Dutton seeks out a spot to make camp where his cell won’t get calls.

I can’t be the only one who thinks that “Yellowstone” was better when it portrayed life on the Dutton ranch rather than life in the boardroom. The show’s ratings success and its place in our shared pop culture consciousness reinforced that “get away from it all” feeling sought in every episode.

“Tracker” aims to do the same. Justin Hartley, familiar from “This is Us” and “Smallville,” plays Colter Shaw – now there’s a “last frontier” name if I ever heard one – and as episodes unfold, we learn that he and his siblings grew up “off the grid” with their father and mother. It wasn’t an idyllic life: The elder Shaw was running from his mistakes, apparently, and the kids were traumatized by life on the run.

But Colter picked up a lot of handy knowledge from those days that he applies to his job as a “rewardist,” an awkward name for what he does: Go into remote areas to find lost hikers or mountain climbers or into small towns to find people who’ve been pulled into a cult.

He’s a tracker, in other words, and he does so for a price.

Into the Wild

As long as adventures in the wilderness have unfolded on our TVs, there’s been a character who does the right thing … for money. Matt Dillon didn’t earn more than his marshal’s salary, for sure, but bounty hunters and troubleshooters like “Paladin” rode through the wilderness with a reward in mind. Paladin, the main character of “Have Gun, Will Travel,” a show that aired in the late 1950s and early 1960s, charged a princely $1,000 per job. In “Tracker,” Colter Shaw charges amounts up to $50,000 or collects a $20,000 reward offer.

There are serialized aspects of “Tracker.” Early in the season, viewers were doled out bits of information about Shaw’s past and his family. Why did his professor father go off the grid? What did Shaw’s older brother Russell do and why is he trying to get in touch with Colter now? What is Shaw’s mother hiding?

One of the mysteries I hope we solve is who his allies and helpers are. Eric Graise is Bob, his “man in the chair,” as one of the Spider-Man movies referred to this type of character, a technology wizard who can find the answer to any question Shaw calls in from the field, and Robin Weigert and Abby McEnany are a delight as Teddi and Velma, a couple who find cases for Shaw to pursue and worry about him along the way.

A Certain Set of Skills

Shaw’s character is full of outdoors know-how besides the ability to pick up footprints on the terrain, like how long someone can survive hypothermia. He learned all this from his survivalist father. Shaw is also something of a numbers whiz, not unlike Jack Reacher in the “Reacher” series.

So far in “Tracker” we haven’t seen Shaw rest his ear on a rail to listen for an oncoming train or hold his finger to the wind to read the breeze, but there’s a lot made of his ability to follow tracks over rough ground. And he makes good use of technology – often supplied by his support staff – to find people.

“Tracker” takes place in several picturesque locales. The pilot, which aired after the Super Bowl, takes place in Oregon, around the city of Klamath Falls. Later episodes revolve around Missoula, Montana, and Mount Shasta, California.

With future episodes named “St. Louis” and “Lexington,” two cities, we’ll see how remote and rural upcoming “Tracker” stories will be.

One thing that “Tracker” has in common with series like “Longmire” and “Big Sky” and “Joe Pickett” is that they’re all based on books by established authors. “Tracker” is taken from “The Never Game,” a 2019 thriller by author Jeffrey Deaver that has so far spawned three sequels. Deaver is maybe best known as the author of the Lincoln Rhyme “Bone Collector” books.

Deaver’s other works aren’t confined to remote locales like most of Johnson’s and CJ Box’s novels are, but so far “Tracker” – with a pilot written by Ben H. Winters that sets the tone on showing appreciation and respect for the great outdoors, and its dangers – seems very familiar to those previous hits.

Tracker is currently airing on CBS and is available to stream on Paramount+ and Pluto TV.

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This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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