As series pitches go, CBS’s Tracker is as high-concept and straight-ahead as it gets.
Each week, Justin Hartley, who already proved his hunk bonafides on NBC's This Is Us, stars as “rewardist” Colter Shaw, a loner with a past, who drives his GMC pickup and vintage trailer into a new town, full of modestly paid, largely unknown actors who play Shaw’s supporters, foils and bedmates, as he tries to “track” down his latest missing person target.
For the series adapted from the novel The Never Game by Jeffery Deaver, there's no scheme or anything being “turned on its head” here. The execution, as overseen by showrunners Hilary Weisman Graham and creator Ben H. Winters, works like one of those Vince Lombardi sweeps.
Here it comes. Everybody knows the play. But nobody can stop it.
Also read: ‘Tracker’ Gets Second Season on CBS
On Sunday, 10 weeks after Tracker's boffo post-Super Bowl debut, the 20th Television series averaged 7.7 million same-day viewers, a high-water mark for its regular 9 p.m. Sunday time slot.
Already renewed for 2024-25, this wasn't even close to being Tracker's biggest audience. That came for its premiere, when it averaged 18.44 million viewers leading out of CBS’s record Super Bowl broadcast. The series also averaged 8.19 million viewers when it led out of 60 Minutes at 8 p.m. on April 14.
Averaging 8.606 million viewers, not only is Tracker the leader among Big Four Network shows in total audience, it also owns the 18-49 demo crown, averaging a 0.88 rating.
The freshman series leads a list with only two other scripted shows on it, one of them an animated series in its 35th season, another a Chuck Lorre comedy about to sign off the air and cede to a spinoff.
What's surprising to us, living in media-entertainment world in which Warner Bros. Discovery festooned its second quarter earnings in pink last year following the boffo theatrical debut of Barbie, is how little fanfare Tracker has received so far outside of CBS' own air time.
“We knew we had something special when we saw the very first cut of the series and the overwhelming audience response confirms it," said CBS Entertainment president Amy Reisenbach, in a statement announcing Tracker's renewal.
And sure, Tracker was referenced a couple of times, thumbnail photo included, in the "TV Media" section of Paramount Global's Q1 earnings release Monday.
But the fact that CBS has a new, original scripted series hit, drawing an outsized audience in an era in which all the viewership metrics are steeply declining, seems buried amid the vast turmoil occurring at Paramount this week.
Indeed, the big Nielsen numbers we see for CBS are only the audience metrics for Tracker we know about.
How much audience is Tracker drawing to Paramount Plus, where episodes stream the day after they premiere on CBS? Paramount Plus subscribers were up by 3.7 million in the first quarter. Was that all Super Bowl LVIII?
And what's the uptake on Disney Plus, where the show streams internationally?
Trying to locate a media-entertainment future all on its own in a strange, competitive M&A market, there's probably a reward waiting for Paramount for tracking all this ratings data down and sharing it with us.
