CBS has put out the first teaser for “Tracker” Season 4, and it does the two things a teaser for a returning procedural is supposed to do. It confirms a date, 4 October, and it quietly announces that the show is not where you left it. After three seasons shot in Vancouver, “Tracker” has picked itself up and moved production to Los Angeles, and unlike most relocations of this kind, the series is not pretending it did not happen.
For anyone who has not been keeping up, “Tracker” is one of the last genuine broadcast hits, built on a simple engine: Colter Shaw (Justin Hartley) is a survivalist who chases reward money, taking missing persons cases the police have run out of road on. It has run 13 episodes, then 20, then 22, and it is expected to run 22 again this year. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the Season 3 finale and what it set up for Season 4.
After three seasons shot in Vancouver, “Tracker” has picked itself up and moved production to Los Angeles, and unlike most relocations of this kind, the series is not pretending it did not happen.”
It is worth remembering how “Tracker” got here, because the trajectory is unusual for broadcast television in 2026. CBS launched it out of the Super Bowl in February 2024, gave it a 13-episode first season, then more than doubled the order to 20 for the second and 22 for the third. Networks do not expand a show like that unless it is genuinely working. What has not held steady is the company around Colter. Robin Weigert’s Teddi Bruin left after the first season, and both Eric Graise and Abby McEnany departed ahead of the third, thinning the operation down to Hartley and Reenie Greene (Fiona Rene).
The move to Los Angeles is a tax story before it is a creative one. The production relocated to take advantage of California’s incentives, which is the same calculation that has been quietly pulling shows back into the state all year. What makes it interesting is that “Tracker” has written the change into the show rather than shooting Los Angeles as a stand-in for somewhere else. Hartley put it plainly: “I’m excited we’re bringing Tracker to L.A. I’m looking forward to continuing to tell these stories alongside the new, fresh places we’ll be heading to next.”
That shows up immediately in the case work. CBS describes the season premiere as involving a dangerous criminal operation at the port of Los Angeles, which is a genuinely different playground for this show. Three seasons of “Tracker” have been forests, mountain roads and small towns, with Colter as a man more comfortable in a treeline than a city. Dropping him into container stacks and dock politics is a real change of texture, and the teaser leans into it.
The footage itself is mostly Colter doing Colter things, which is to say hiding underneath a moving truck and outrunning both boulders and bullets in the space of about thirty seconds. Two cases get set up. Randy (Chris Lee) lays out the first, a single father who, in his words, left home and never came back, and a second thread follows a woman searching for her missing daughter. Neither is reinventing the format, and neither is meant to. The format is the whole reason this show works.
The bigger news is not in the teaser at all. Jensen Ackles is coming back as Russell Shaw, Colter’s older brother, and it is Hartley who confirmed it rather than the network. Ackles has since posted a set photo that suggests Russell turns up fairly early rather than being held back for a late-season reveal. For a stretch this year that return looked genuinely uncertain, and the relocation is part of why.
Ackles is also headlining “Vought Rising,” the Boys prequel, which is a full-time leading role on a different show. A Vancouver production and a guest arc can be scheduled around each other. A move to Los Angeles changes that maths, and for a while the assumption was that the move had effectively handed Ackles an exit ramp from “Tracker” whether anybody wanted it or not. That it did not happen matters more than usual, because a show that has already lost three regulars cannot afford to quietly lose a fourth.
Especially not this one. The Season 3 finale, “The Best Ones,” did not write Russell out so much as walk him off with the most important object in the series in his pocket. Russell left holding a file, and the file reportedly contains proof that the Shaw brothers’ father experimented on Colter as a child. He was offered a deal by the people who want it buried: take one more job for the Horizon Group and the evidence goes away. He took it, and he did not tell his brother why.
That leaves Season 4 in an unusual position for a case-of-the-week procedural. The show’s central mystery is not a puzzle Colter is solving, it is a piece of information his own brother is deliberately keeping from him, out of what Russell clearly believes is protection. Colter does not know there is anything to look for. The audience does. That gap is the most interesting thing “Tracker” has ever built, and it only pays off if Russell is actually on screen to be lied to and lied for.
Which is the quiet argument for why the Ackles confirmation matters more than the trailer or the postcode. A procedural can survive almost any change of scenery, and “Tracker” has enough weekly machinery to run indefinitely on missing persons and reward money. What it cannot do is leave its one long-form story parked offscreen for a year and expect anybody to still care when it comes back. The Los Angeles move is the headline. Russell walking back through the door is the thing that decides what kind of season this is.
“Tracker” Season 4 premieres Sunday 4 October on CBS, streaming on Paramount+, and is expected to run 22 episodes into next May. Whether the port of Los Angeles turns out to be a one-week setting or the start of a genuinely different show is the first question the premiere has to answer, and the second is how long Russell can hold onto that file before it costs him his brother.
What Do You Think? Is Russell protecting Colter by sitting on what their father did, or just protecting himself from having to be the one who says it out loud? Does moving “Tracker” to Los Angeles cost the show the wilderness identity that made it work, or finally give Colter somewhere new to be out of his depth? And how many episodes can this season really spend on cases of the week before that file has to come out?
See you on the next binge!
