You can find all of 2024’s media anxieties in the CBS drama Tracker

polygon.com:

Taken one way, Tracker, the new CBS drama premiering after the Super Bowl, is perhaps the most generic procedural ever devised. It stars a blandly charming white guy (Justin Hartley of This Is Us fame to most, Smallville fame to me) who makes a living finding missing people and collecting reward money, using his skills as a survivalist to travel the country and notice things others don’t, charming a local lady cop or doctor along the way. On the surface, Tracker is about as generic as network dramas come, the most smooth-brained 42 minutes you can spend between ads shouting WHOPPER WHOPPER WHOPPER WHOPPER or listing pharmaceutical side effects. But I think Tracker is fascinating, actually, based entirely around what it isn’t about.

Colter Shaw (yes, that’s his name) is notably not a cop, nor is he a detective. He calls himself, rather seriously, “a rewardist” — because he tracks down missing people for reward money, which he always collects. This gives Tracker’s protagonist a mercenary edge that the show is not particularly interested in exploring; he is very clearly in it for the money but also a nice guy who wants to get involved and help people, as long as they can pay. Colter’s civilian status is also uninterrogated — since he’s not a cop, the people he questions on his journey to find that episode’s missing person have no real reason to cooperate with him, especially if they’re involved in some criminality.

But again: Shaw has no superlative skills to show off nor weird character quirks that help him navigate such roadblocks. He’s not a prickly Sherlock Holmes type, nor does he have an unusual talent like immediately knowing when someone is lying or rigging together elaborate gizmos out of pantry items. In Tracker, things just work out for Colter, because if they didn’t the show would stop in its tracks.

Because of all this, Tracker comes across as an extraordinarily anxious show, one carefully built to not alienate anyone, ultimately being compelling to no