‘The Locator’ tracks down an audience

There ARE no unhappy endings on “The Locator,” the reality program in which families and friends are reunited after years apart. All ruptures can be healed. All past sins forgiven.

The show, which will conclude its first season Saturday (WE, 9 p.m.), has taken charity-driven reality television to its next logical step: the formation of the self. Most programs of this sort address consequences: how a person dresses, where a person lives, etc. But “The Locator,” which revolves around the private-investigator practice of Troy Dunn, is interested in causes. Everyone who receives the gift of Dunn’s services -- these are angel cases that he takes on free of charge -- believes that the person he or she seeks holds the key to resolving a difficult part of his or her life. These are people weighed down by ghosts and memories. Or, as Dunn puts it in the show’s intro, “You can’t find peace until you find all the pieces.”

At least, that’s the hope. For a show about reunion, “The Locator” is curiously incurious about reconciliation. Episodes follow a simple arc -- a person requests Dunn’s services with an affecting sob story; Dunn and his team work the phones and use other methods to track the target down; a tearful reunion is sprung upon the client, often at a family gathering.

As for Dunn, he’s a hardy guy, tall and broad. He sports boxy blazers and a choirboy haircut. His bearing is certain, but gentle -- decades of imposing on other peoples’ lives seems to have left him incapable of offense. In each episode, he flies in a private plane -- a motivational speaker, radio host and author, he has wealth from other sources -- from one town to the next, navigating bruised relationships. At the end of each episode, as the reunited pair reacquaint themselves with each other, Dunn literally sneaks away, his work done.

“I believe he’s everything that you have wanted,” Dunn told Nicole, a woman about to be reunited with the brother she was separated from as a child, in an episode a few weeks ago.

Seeing people receive a chance at healing themselves is unfailingly moving. But given how much of an impact the feelings unearthed on “The Locator” have, it’s notable just how unremarkable the show feels. Even though the payoff moment is gripping, everything else is predictable -- there are no cases in which Dunn can’t track the person down, or where that person, once found, doesn’t consent to the reunion.

This seamlessness robs “The Locator” of drama. And because it’s just half an hour, it lacks the oomph of shows like “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” which have more time to develop and exploit tension. Plus, the concision invites skepticism. There must be intense behind-the-scenes mach- inations to pull these reunions off, but they go largely unnoted. And there must be some fudging of the time frame each one takes, but if you believe the show, it takes only a matter of days.

But it is credulousness that is the greatest weakness of “The Locator,” which has been renewed for a second season after receiving some of the highest ratings in the history of WE. (Its premiere was the network’s most-watched program ever.) The show generally takes for granted the purity of the motives of those who ask for help. But in at least a couple of episodes, that seemed potentially unwise.

“What if she’s drinking again? What if she’s not a good person?” So wondered Cassie, a daughter being sought out by her mother after more than a decade, in an episode two weeks ago. (Unfounded concerns, it turned out.) The previous week had been even more disconcerting. In that episode, Annie, a middle-aged woman, sought out a childhood friend, Nicole, with whom she’d had a series of misadventures.

In this case, the seeker had pulled her life together and suspected, correctly, that the person sought had not. When they were reunited, both with daughters in tow, it was clear that while this was a reunion for Annie, it was much more of an opportunity for Nicole, who’d had a difficult life. It was the one episode that ended in an even more difficult place than it began, and proof that bringing two people back together is a beginning, not an end.