FISCHER: A good time for bad TV

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

There is just so much to watch.

The new season of “Star Trek: Discovery” has started and I’d love to sit down with it but the show is going to have to take its place on a seemingly endless list of things to catch-up on.

I haven’t watched the latest season of “Only Murders in the Building,” I never finished the John Wick spin-off “The Continental,” I haven’t even started “Hazbin Hotel,” and I am woefully behind on “Star Wars: The Bad Batch.”

So, of course, with this wealth of entertainment at my disposal, what I have been watching lately?

“Tracker,” a new procedural drama from CBS.

Starring Justin Hartley, best known (by me at least) for his role as the Green Arrow on “Smallville” the show is about an expert survivalist who makes his living finding missing people and generally ends up solving or preventing various crimes in the process. It harkens back to the glory days of the ’80s where every third action drama was about a hyper-competent hero wandering from town to town and getting caught up in a conflict between the local bad guy and their downtrodden victims.

Is “Tracker” particularly good?

No. Not really. In fact, the show is pretty much the textbook definition of generic. If you asked ChatGPT to come up with the most formulaic action drama possible, this is what it would churn out.

The plots are simple, the supporting characters are unremarkable, the action is so-so, and the overarching mystery being drip fed from episode to episode has yet to be particularly grabbing.

And the dialogue … wow, the dialogue. Every scene has an 87% chance of Hartley’s character making up some nonsense probability statistic on the spot and nobody on the show has time for natural conversations, opting instead to just info-dump exposition and backstory at each other with all the subtlety of a thrown brick.

So why am I watching it?

Well, aside from being a sucker for these kind of “lone hero” shows, it’s just good enough to hold my attention without being overly demanding of it.

I’ve been working on a project in my spare time that involves a fair amount of monotonous and repetitive tasks and “Tracker” is just the right level of engaging that I can follow the show without it disrupting what I’m doing.

Suddenly, the archetypal characters and blunt dialogue become selling points. I don’t need to worry about missing subtle character development because there isn’t any. They just spell everything out for you right in the open.

As a friend of mine put it, “It’s the perfect show to watch while you’re doing something else.”

I’ll get around to those other shows when I can find time to sit down and fully appreciate them.

In the meantime though, I’m glad to have some to watch that’s just good enough.

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and looks for the good even in the mediocre.