4 months ago
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The Nielsen ratings for the most recent season of TV are out and the show that came out on top was CBS’ Tracker starring This Is Us’ Justin Hartley. Tracker, which debuted in February after the Super Bowl, is the number one non-sports related primetime show on broadcast television. It follows Colter Shaw, who is a professional tracker and rewardist, meaning he uses his particular set of skills to look for missing people in exchange for reward money. He’s assisted by his lawyer, two handlers, and a requisite techie who can pretty much do it all. There’s also an overarching story involving the mysterious death of Colter’s dad when he was a child. The show is based on a book series.
Colter’s adventures are working for a lot of people because Tracker had an average of 11.58 million viewers. There’s a couple of neat things to note about its success. The first one is that the last time a brand new series hit number one one in the ratings was Survivor, all the way back in 2000. The second thing is that Tracker is also apparently the most watched new show since Desperate Housewives’s first season in 2004-2005.
Following NBC’s This Is Us, which aired from 2016 to 2022, Justin Hartley has segued into Tracker on CBS, another immediate success. Based on this abbreviated post double-strike season, Tracker finished No. 1 in primetime in total viewers (excluding sports), with an average 11.58 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Comparably, this marks the first time a new series in primetime topped the primetime charts since Survivor on CBS in the 2000-01 season. Tracker is also the most-watched new series since Desperate Housewives in 2004-05, which averaged 23.7 million viewers. In today’s highly fractionalized content environment (translation: the digital streaming services), that 11.58 million viewer tally for Tracker is probably the equivalent of what the residents of fictional Wisteria Lane scored 19 years ago.
CBS is also reporting 19 million multiplatform viewers, in total, for Tracker, on average, based on live plus 35-day viewing (for the first seven episodes). As the home of the No. 1 new series each season for the past nine years, the Eye network is no stranger to chart-topping TV shows. Specifically, Bull (in 2016-17), Young Sheldon (2017-18), FBI (2018-19), FBI: Most Wanted (2019-20), The Equalizer (2020-21), Ghosts (2021-22) and Fire Country (2022-23). This self-described “embarrassment of riches” is why CBS has chosen to prematurely end fan favorite So Help Me Todd, which has been the subject of a massive campaign for a third season by the fans in recent weeks.
As a result of the breakout success of Tracker, CBS next fall will move the Justin Hartley drama up one hour, to Sunday at 8 p.m. ET (flipping time periods with returning The Equalizer, which shifts to 9 p.m.).
Last year’s number one series was CBS’ NCIS, with 9.8 million viewers, so it is nice to see some new blood out there being competitive. Is anyone else watching Tracker? I stream it on Mondays through Paramount Plus! I love a good procedural. There’s something comforting about the format and I especially enjoy the ones that have a standalone (“monster-of-the-week”) format with an overarching story or mystery that gets slowly unrolled throughout the season. I didn’t realize this past week’s episode was the season finale, which is a bummer because we just got Dean Winchester Jensen Ackles as a big player and it ended just as the dad mystery thing was getting somewhere. I’m excited for Season 2 and hope that it’s just as much fun to watch as Season 1 was.
