When searching for his next role after the conclusion of This Is Us, star Justin Hartley knew replicating the beloved NBC drama would be unrealistic — but replicating the feeling making the Emmy-winning series gave him might be doable.
“It wasn’t necessarily an action show I was looking for, or a movie, comedy, theater, writing a book,” Hartley, who leads CBS’s new drama Tracker, tells EW ahead of its Super Bowl Sunday premiere. “It was whatever might maintain that feeling I had when I was on This Is Us. Where you’re just so proud of what you’re doing. It was about starting something that I thought from inception would be great.”
Tracker is an adaptation of Jeffrey Deaver’s novel The Never Game, which follows “reward seeker” Colter Shaw as he uses survivalist skills to track things and people… for a price. Colter lives in an airstream and travels from place to place, embarking on a new mystery in each episode. Colter’s job could be to find a missing person (often before the 24-hour window for someone to be declared missing by authorities), a criminal authorities are looking for, missing evidence, or some other object. If there’s something to be found with a bounty attached, Colter could end up on its trial.
Tracker’s main character has certainly earned his loner badge, but he doesn’t actually do his work completely solo. He works with couple Teddi and Velma Bruin (Robin Weigert and Abby McEnany) as well as tech expert Bob Exley (Eric Graise). Teddi and Velma coordinate his cases and pay (and sometimes get him out of trouble with the law) and Bob digs for information to help on each hunt.
On the surface, Colter is an attractive, charismatic man who helps people using his special set of skills, but the reason he does this work stems from his own complicated past. His father, who Colter withdrew, became increasingly paranoid and moved his family off the grid, which is where, as a young boy, Colter familiarized himself with the outdoors and learned all those survivalist skills. As Hartley puts it, Colter’s childhood was “unconventional in every sense of the word.”
His father’s death leads to a wider family fracture: he’s estranged from his siblings and mysteriously can’t trust his mother, who is played by Mary McDonnell. “Imagine knowing that your mother is a liar. Imagine not being able to trust your mother. These are big things,” Hartley says.
So while Colter is “helping people and it’s great,” he’s also “running away from things he doesn’t want to face,” Hartley says. “It’s a very interesting thing to see somebody that’s so capable in certain regards and then so unfulfilled and broken. He’s unable to figure out the puzzle of his family, and it’s something I hope we get time to figure out.”
Tracker premieres Feb. 11 on CBS after Super Bowl LVIII.
