Justin Hartley’s Tracker Renewed for Season 2

Tracker, which has been drawing huge ratings since it premiered following the Super Bowl earlier this year, has scored the 2023-2024 season’s first renewal for a freshman series. The show will officially return to CBS for the 2024-2025 TV season, scoring its renewal after just four episodes have aired. Of course, with those episodes averaging 16 million viewers across platforms (and a reported 30 million for that post-Super Bowl premiere), it feels like a no-brainer anyway. 

The 9 p.m. Sunday slot has seen an 83% increase in ratings since last year, with Tracker earning the kind of numbers that Young Sheldon and Empire did in their first seasons. That’s a pretty solid accomplishment, considering the overall state of TV ratings now as opposed to six or ten years ago.

“Tracker kicked off our premiere week with a ratings bang and has kept the momentum going,” said Amy Reisenbach, president of CBS Entertainment (via Deadline). “We knew we had something special when we saw the very first cut of the series and the overwhelming audience response confirms it. We couldn’t be more grateful to Justin, the talented cast, the incredible writing and producing teams and our partners at 20th Television for such compelling episodes. And, of course, we’re also so thankful to the millions of viewers tuning in each week.”

Tracker is based on the bestselling novel The Never Game by Jeffery Deaver, whose character Lincoln Rhyme has appeared onscreen a few times, most famously in the Denzel Washington movie The Bone Collector. The series stars Hartley as Colter Shaw, an off-the-grid survivalist and tracker who travels the country using his expert tracking skills to help private citizens and law enforcement solve a variety of mysteries.

Hartley, who first gained fame playing the role of Oliver Queen/Green Arrow on Smallville, spent most of the intervening years on the mega-hit This Is Us. He also recently appeared on Quantum Leap. Tracker marks his first outing as a solo series lead (although he certainly has been pretty high up on the call sheet in several projects, most notably on Emily Owens, MD).

Per the Deadline story, Hartley, Ken Olin, Elwood Reid and Ben Winters serve as executive producers. 

Tracker airs on the CBS on Sundays, and is available to stream live and on-demand on Paramount+.