Justin Hartley Series ‘Tracker’ Gets Early Season 2 Renewal By CBS

Nellie Andreeva
·3 min read
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Tracker, the first new broadcast drama to premiere this season, is also the first freshman scripted series to land a Season 2 renewal. Amid strong ratings following its post-Super Bowl premiere, CBS has picked up a second season of the series starring Justin Hartley after four airings.

Boosted by its premiere behind the Super Bowl, which has drawn 30 million multiplatform viewers, Tracker, from 20th Television, ranks as the #1 most watched show on television.

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Since its high-profile debut, the drama is averaging nearly 16 million multi-platform viewers, improving its Sunday 9 PM time slot by 83% vs. last year, and is the most watched new series since Young Sheldon in 2017/18 (16.49m viewers), and the most watched new drama since 2014/15’s Empire (17.33m viewers).

There is no ratings data available for Tracker‘s most recent fourth airing last night but its second episode drew the largest CBS audience of premiere week, 12.9M viewers, after seven days of viewing across broadcast and streaming, about doubling the same-day audience of 6.9M. The third episode was up to 7.1M same-day viewers, indicating that the show is keeping its momentum.

“Tracker kicked off our premiere week with a ratings bang and has kept the momentum going,” said Amy Reisenbach, president of CBS Entertainment. “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.”

In an interview with Deadline before Tracker‘s premiere, Reisenbach spoke of the decision to delay the launch of the show whose pilot was delivered to the network in November 2022 to the 2023-24 season in order to give it a longer promotional runway.

The first spots for Tracker dropped during CBS’ March Madness last spring, and in May the network announced that the series would premiere after the Super Bowl, a slot Hartley is familiar with as his previous series, NBC’s This Is Us, also aired an episode after the Big Game.

Because of the strike, production on all scripted series was delayed, so the Tracker producers had to scramble to make their marquee Super Bowl premiere, which they did successfully.

The series, based on the bestselling novel The Never Game by Jeffery Deaver, stars Hartley as Colter Shaw, a lone-wolf survivalist who roams the country as a reward seeker, using his expert tracking skills to help private citizens and law enforcement solve all manner of mysteries while contending with his own fractured family.

Hartley, Ken Olin, Elwood Reid and Ben Winters serve as executive producers. Tracker airs on CBS and is available to stream live and on-demand on Paramount+.

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