The Real Reason Tracker and Marshals Don’t Start on Time on CBS Sundays

Sunday nights on CBS have become a moving target: Tracker, Marshals and Watson keep blowing past their 8–10 p.m. slots. Viewers showing up for Luke Grimes’ Yellowstone spinoff at 8 and Justin Hartley at 9 are met with yet another delay — and here’s what keeps pushing the schedule off course.

If you keep trying to watch CBS on Sundays and your shows never start when the guide says they will, you are not imagining it. The network lines up Marshals at 8 p.m. ET, Tracker at 9 p.m. ET, and Watson at 10 p.m. ET... and then football happens.

Why your Sunday shows are always late

• NFL games run long. A lot. CBS carries those afternoon matchups, which pushes everything back.
• 60 Minutes follows football, and when the game goes over, so does 60 Minutes. That shift ripples through the whole night.
• Live events pile on. Tracker spent its first season dodging delays from March Madness and the CMT Music Awards, among others.

And yet, Tracker is still a ratings tank

Delays did not hurt Justin Hartley and company. Tracker premiered in February 2024 right after the Super Bowl and was touted as the most-watched broadcast series premiere since NCIS hit its Mark Harmon milestone back in September 2021. Across its first season, Paramount+ and broadcast measurements put the average at 18.2 million viewers per episode.

Variety’s annual top 100 most-watched primetime telecasts list? Tracker episodes grabbed 15 of those spots. Even after CBS made everyone wait 11 weeks for new installments, the season 2 premiere pulled in 8.3 million viewers, up nearly 10 percent from the season 1 finale. That was the show’s biggest audience since its post-Super Bowl debut.

What the show actually is

Tracker follows Colter (Hartley), a survivalist who roams the country solving different disappearances and mysteries each week. Simple hook, slick execution, easy to drop in for an episode. That formula travels well, even when kickoff messes with your DVR.

Hartley on the guest-star glow-up and what is coming

Hartley, 48, told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month that the show’s heat has opened a lot of doors, in part because he has spent two decades banking relationships. That is how you get familiar faces like Jensen Ackles and Hartley’s wife, Sofia Pernas, popping up. He says people trust he will only call if the gig is cool, fun, and genuinely good for them, and now the show is big enough that more talent wants in.

"You are going to get the last five episodes in a row. So, you are getting five separate movies... As we are inching closer to the end of the season, we creep closer and closer to the mystery of what the hell happened to Colter’s father."

He also teased where season 3 could go. One idea he likes: flip the script and put Colter on the run, framed for something, using all those survival skills to stay ahead of the authorities. Tie it into his family history, maybe even drag the government into it. The team has several options on the board and a core plan for next year without yanking the show off its current path.

When to actually watch

On paper: Marshals Sundays at 8 p.m. ET, Tracker at 9 p.m. ET, Watson at 10 p.m. ET on CBS. In practice: expect everything to slide later whenever NFL coverage spills over or a big live event pops up. If you would rather skip the waiting game, new episodes hit Paramount+ the next day.