The Biggest Differences Between Tracker and the Novel It’s Based On (2024)

The action drama television series Tracker stars Justin Hartley as Colter Shaw, an expert survivalist and tracker who has built a career out of assisting law enforcement and private citizens by finding missing persons in exchange for reward money. Tracker is based on the 2019 novel The Never Game, the first installment in the Colter Shaw book series, which presently encompasses four novels.

Tracker, which became the most-watched show of 2024 and is set to begin its second season on CBS on October 27, 2024, has drawn comparisons to Prime Video’s hit action series Reacher. Like Reacher, Tracker is based on a popular book series that features a lone-wolf protagonist who travels across the United States in a nomadic fashion. Like Reacher protagonist Jack Reacher, Shaw is surrounded by a small team of people whom he trusts.

In addition to the similarities between Reacher and Tracker, Hartley and Reacher star Alan Ritchson both portrayed the superhero Aquaman on television. However, Reacher and Tracker are separated in terms of how closely each show follows their source material. While the first season of Reacher became a fairly faithful adaptation of the first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor, virtually, the first season of Tracker departed from the plot of The Never Game while maintaining the attributes and personal history of the character from the book series.

Like Reacher, Tracker is fueled by the charismatic presence of Hartley, who has infused Colter with a degree of likability and warmth that makes Colter seem much more believable and relatable on the show than he seems on the page.

Tracker Features Old and New Characters

Tracker

Crime

Drama

See Also

All 6 Tracker Characters On Colter Shaw’s Team, Ranked By Likability

Release Date

February 11, 2024

Cast

Justin Hartley , Mary McDonnell , Lee Tergesen

Seasons

1

Besides core series character Colter Shaw, the first season of Tracker features several existing characters from the Colter Shaw book series, including Colter’s mother, Mary Shaw, estranged older brother Russell, sister Dorian Shaw, as well as Colter’s married handlers Teddi and Velma, and Colter’s father, Ashton Shaw, who taught Colter and Colter’s siblings how to survive in the wilderness and beyond.

The newly introduced characters in Tracker are Bobby, Colter’s technical expert, and Reenie, an attorney who assists Colter with disentangling himself from the various legal problems he encounters in the course of his dangerous and unpredictable line of work. While new characters are introduced in each episode, as dictated by the show’s procedural format, Tracker, like the book series, is grounded in the theme of family, in terms of how Colter struggles to process his fractured family dynamic and reconcile the painful memories of his unconventional childhood.

One of the biggest differences between Tracker and its source of material is how the show utilizes the magnetism of series star Justin Hartley, who previously endeared himself to audiences with his affecting performance in the powerful drama series This Is Us and makes Colter into a much more expressive and humorous character than exists in the book series, in which Colter is presented as being the very definition of the strong-and-silent type.

Tracker Tells New Stories

While Tracker has adopted many of the character elements of the Colter Shaw book series, most of the plots of the first-season episodes are quite different from the plots of the books. In the pilot episode, Colter is tasked with finding a missing teenage boy, whom Colter eventually finds handcuffed to a truck in a forest, while The Never Game, the novel on which Tracker is ostensibly based, features three kidnap victims, including a missing college student, an LGBT activist, and a pregnant woman.

One of the most recognizable episodes, in relation to the book series, is the “Missoula” episode, in which Colter must infiltrate a deadly cult to find a missing man. This episode resembles the second installment in the book series, the 2020 novel The Goodbye Man, in which Colter’s pursuit of two armed fugitives in the Washington State wilderness leads him to The Foundation, a cult run by a madman who demands horrifying loyalty from his followers.

Tracker Is a Contemporary Take on a Classic Formula

Despite its survivalist protagonist and wilderness values, Tracker follows all the conventions ofthe procedural genre, in which Colter Shaw variously functions as a good Samaritan, private detective, and soldier of fortune throughout the series.

Beyond the show’s contemporary presentation, many of the plots of the show’s episodes could have been transplanted from the plots of classic 1970s private detective shows like The Rockford Files. Like The Rockford Files, which is based in California but has titular protagonist Jim Rockford traveling around the United States throughout the series, Tracker follows Colter on different cases in different places while surrounding him with a colorful assortment of characters from all walks of life.

One of the most contemporary aspects of Tracker is the psychological approach that Colter brings to his pursuit of missing people. With every important decision Colton makes in his work, he calculates the odds of success. This also happens in the book series, beginning with The Never Game, in which Colter concludes that there’s a 60 percent chance of finding a missing person alive.

While Colter performs these calculations in the book by talking to himself, Colter discusses these percentages out loud in Tracker, in which Colter often shares this information with the people he’s trying to help gain their trust. This was a key creative point for Justin Hartley and the Tracker creative team members, who felt that having Colter continually rattling off numbers in his head wasn’t conducive to television and frankly made the character look and seem crazy.