Season 2 of Tracker has come to an end. By mid-season, they’d wrapped up a central storyline from the first season, and throughout the second half of the season, they tackled more of the Shaw family secrets. Tracker is a formulaic drama, with the aforementioned plots serving as overall story arcs while each episode maintained a Monster of the Week format. The procedural format has worked out for them, though. For the second year in a row, Tracker is the #1 show on network TV. Variety recently caught up with star Justin Hartley to talk to him about the season as a whole, Colter’s personal growth, and the series’ secret sauce for success. Head’s up: the excerpt below doesn’t contain spoilers, but the entire interview I linked to is full of spoilers.
The procedural format is versatile but can also feel constraining, but for two years in a row, “Tracker” has been the No. 1 show on network television. To what do you credit the overwhelming success of the show? How exactly have you and your creative team been able to break through in such an overcrowded genre?
It’s a great question, and I think it’s changed a little bit. Initially, we got really lucky. We have a studio and a network that really believed in us. They gave us all the tools, and they gave us all the opportunity with the advertising and post-Super Bowl [premiere slot]. After that, you just have to prove yourself, because obviously you’re going to have a big audience after the Super Bowl, but then you have to have a really good show. Otherwise, people are not going to return over and over and over again. People are busy! We try to come up with really compelling stories that people haven’t seen before, and we try to put this guy in believable situations that are quite harrowing at the same time.
One of the things that we do is, for instance — gosh, without getting too specific, and I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus, but I’m not a huge fan of these shows [where] the music kicks in before anything happens, and you’re sort of telling me how to feel, you know what I mean? I always give this example: It’s like Colter hasn’t even picked up his [ringing] phone yet, and the music’s already going. It could be his girlfriend. It could be Amazon. We don’t know. Why do we have this music? Why are you telling me how to feel? Sometimes, I think you can get rid of all of that and just have a scene that’s dry with two actors talking. So I guess we try to push the boundaries that way, and the studio and the network are receptive to all of that.
We’re also very aware and respectful of the fact that we have an audience that finds comfort in the formula that we have, so we’re not going to go off the rails into a musical or anything like that, but we just try to make the best show that we can every week. My goal is to make every single episode better than the last.
Hartley is spot-on here about people watching certain shows because of the comfort in the formula. We watch soap operas for plot twists, prestige dramas for the unpredictable and the acting, and formulaic, over-the-top network shows for the excitement and comfort in knowing that our heroes will survive impossible odds. 9-1-1 found this out the hard way when they killed off a popular character recently. I stopped watching my embarrassingly guilty pleasure Blue Bloods when they killed off a specific character. (Please don’t judge me!) If formulaic shows want to throw a curveball, they add a new character, which this season of Tracker did very well when they seamlessly integrated Bobby’s cousin, Randy, into the mix. Viewers know the stakes are low and we like that it’s just stressful enough to keep us engaged, but not so much so that we’re watching it in constant dread. The real world is stressful enough.
Photos credit: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon, IMAGO/Dave Starbuck/Avalon, Getty and via Instagram
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