Lonely hero is back, quietly tracking

Our screens used to be populated by quietly heroic loners.
There was Shane and Paladin and Johnny Yuma and more, including The Man With No Name. They roamed the Old West, sometimes saving people.
They vanished in the age of anti-heroes, but sometimes re-appear. The key show is “Tracker” (shown here) which returns at 8 p.m. Sunday (Oct. 13), to launch CBS’ belated fall season.
Justin Hartley stars as a quiet guy who roams the country, finding people. Ken Olin, a former leading man himself, is the producer and director.
“Ken kept saying, ‘I want to do an old-fashioned show, but I want to do an elevated old-fashioned show.’” said Elwood Reid, the showrunner. “I didn’t quite know what he meant.”
Then he got it. “Tracker” adds lots of extra touches for its hero, Colter Shaw, ranging from family trauma to high-tech assistants. But at its core, this is the type of hero we’ve seen before.
He’s “the kind of lone-wolf guy (who) comes into town,” Reid said. “He’s going to help somebody.”
This is a focused, case-of-the-week series, spare with dialog and emotions. It’s “very different from the show that we were coming from,” Olin said..
That show — “This Is Us,” with Hartley as a star and Olin as producer-director — was rooted in outspoken family drama; so was “thirtysomething,” which Olin starred in 35 years ago. Now he and Hartley were looking for an opposite sort of project.
“He said, ‘I think you’ve got to read this book. I really love this character,’”
Hart;ey said.
It was “The Never Game,” the first of Jeffery Deaver’s novels centering on Shaw. CBS gave it an early series commitment, then scheduled the opening episode to follow the Super Bowl.
That propelled “Tracker” to the top. Even if you don’t count the Super Bowl episode, the show averaged 10.84 million viewers. That put it at No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings, followed by three more CBS shows – “NCIS” at 9.66 million, “Young Sheldon” at 9.28 and “FBI” at 8.8 million … a full two million behind “Tracker.”
Now the show is back, with minor adjustments. In the season’s first episode, we see that two of Colter’s contacts are working together; Velma (Abby McEnany) is helping Reeme (Fiona Rene) start her own law office. (Another contact, tech-whiz Bobby, played by Eric Graise, still works alone.)
And in the second, we see that Colter’s family complications continue. His brother Russell (Jensen Ackles of “Supernatural”) is back.
There are still major issues involving them, their late father, their sister and more. In a dysfunctional family, Reid said, “you know nobody has any information that’s correct. Everybody has their own different reality.”
But at the core, he said, this remains a story of a quiet loner. It’s like “the shows that I grew up with.”