Marshals TV Review: Luke Grimes leads the Yellowstone franchise into the world of police procedurals

Plot: With the Yellowstone Ranch behind him, Kayce Dutton joins an elite unit of U.S. Marshals, combining his skills as a cowboy and Navy SEAL to bring range justice to Montana. Kayce and his teammates must balance the high psychological cost of serving as the last line of defense in the region’s war on violence with their duty to their families, including Kayce’s son, Tate, and his confidantes, Mo and Thomas Rainwater from the Broken Rock reservation.

Review: As the dramatic saga of Yellowstone came to a close on screen and behind the scenes just over a year ago, the Taylor Sheridan-created series was poised to launch multiple spin-offs. From the Rip and Beth series, The Dutton Ranch, to the 1923 sequel titled 1944, and the tangential series The Madison, there are so many shows set to continue the story from where the 2024 finale left off for the powerful Montana family. The first series to hit broadcast, however, is the vastly different Marshals. Led by Luke Grimes reprising his role as Kayce Dutton, Marshals is the first Yellowstone series to debut on network television and will eschew the soap-opera dramatics of the original series, instead placing Kayce in a police procedural. If the idea of an NCIS or CSI-style Yellowstone series appeals to you, then Marshals will be right up your alley. As a fan of the Yellowstone franchise, I feel it is my duty to let you down easily and say that not only is Marshals the weakest series to bear Taylor Sheridan’s name, but it is also not a very good cop show.

At the end of Yellowstone, John Dutton (Kevin Costner) was dead, and Beth (Kelly Reilly) killed Jamie (Wes Bentley) in revenge before Rip (Cole Hauser) disposed of his body. Kayce (Luke Grimes) returned the Yellowstone land to the Broken Rock Reservation while keeping a parcel for his family to live on. As Marshals starts, Kayce is approached by his Navy SEAL commander, Pete Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green), who is running a team out of Montana at the behest of U.S. Marshal Harry Gilford (Brett Cullen). Reluctant at first, Kayce serves as a guide to Calvin and his team, comprising Andrea Cruz (Ash Santos), rookie Miles Kittle (Tatanka Means), and former ATF agent Belle Skinner (Arielle Kebbel). When a bomb is set off that impacts Broken Rock chairman Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham), Kayce is deputized and joins Calvin’s team to bring the criminals to justice. In typical procedural fashion, some bad guys are apprehended within the one-hour running time, and Kayce makes the decision to join the marshals full-time to help bring the rest to justice.

Only the first three episodes of Marshals were made available for this review, and it was immediately apparent that the lack of direct involvement from Taylor Sheridan results in a series that feels dissociated from Yellowstone. There are countless references to events from the main series and to the Dutton clan’s lingering reputation, including Marshal Harry Gilford stating he has a past with John Dutton that leaves him distrustful of Kayce. Each of the three episodes shares some overarching threads related to the bomb in the first episode, but the central storylines are standalone while pulling on elements from Yellowstone, such as the divide between ranchers and Broken Rock, the sale of the Dutton land, and acts by the Dutton family to skuttle an airport and hotel that would have brought jobs and money to Montana. There is also a direct connection to the dumping ground for bodies known as The Train Station that factors into the second episode. The series tries to show the two halves of Kayce’s life, which audiences can easily discern by his hat. If Kayce wears a cowboy hat, he is working his ranch and dealing with personal matters. When he dons a fatigue-colored baseball cap emblazoned with an American flag, he is in Marshal mode.

While each episode opens with a crime followed by an investigation, a shootout, or a chase, and eventual capture or death of a perpetrator. The episodes also try to show Kayce acclimating to his new job while using his Navy SEAL experience to unify his fellow marshals into a team. Yellowstone gave Luke Grimes the chance to show Kayce as someone who did not want to carry the burden of the Dutton legacy, and how he fought his instincts to be a killer or a criminal like his family members. Marshals undoes all of the character development as Kayce is now seemingly reconciled to kill without a second thought, as his body count is fairly substantial in just this trio of episodes. Grimes has moments interacting with Gil Birmingham and Mo Brings Plenty that call back to Dutton family history, and he gets to spout some cryptic dialogue about family, legacy, and honor, but so much of this series is reliant on formulaic cobs-and-robbers storytelling that it does not resonate with what made Yellowstone so popular. I found myself shaking my head and rolling my eyes at the cliché stories in these first episodes and how repetitive it is to see the team gear up, kick ass, talk about it back at the office, shed some brief backstory on one another, and repeat.

The spin-off is created by showrunner Spencer Hudnut, who oversaw The Blacklist: Redemption and the seven-season Paramount+ series SEAL Team. Hudnut’s experience writing about military units and balancing their work and home lives is lifted right into Marshals while peppering in elements from the characters created by Taylor Sheridan and John Linson. Hudnut wrote the first episodes of the series with Dan Mazer, Abi Morgan, Tom Mularz, and Craig Thomas credited on subsequent chapters. Directors include Christopher Chulack (SEAL Team) and Greg Yaitanes (House of the Dragon). The production values are impressive for a network series and use the same Utah locations used for the first three seasons of Yellowstone. A lot of the look of Marshals aligns with the amount of money Paramount dumped into Yellowstone, but using the beautiful natural landscape of the American West for gunfights and car chases feels wasteful at best. The series tries to balance the Yellowstone dynamic by featuring moments of country music in bars and conversations about the region’s history, but it comes off as filler padding an otherwise generic series.

Marshals prominently features the signature Yellowstone insignia in all marketing, with every episode showing how indebted the series setting is to Taylor Sheridan’s flagship series, but there is little here that adds to the legacy of the show that inspired it. If anything, Marshals undoes the virtuous redemption Kayce Dutton achieved over the five seasons of Yellowstone and will leave dedicated fans scratching their heads over why. Marshals has the production values of a major project, but ranks nowhere close to any other series in the library of Sheridan-produced or created projects. Marshals will undoubtedly be a hit for CBS as audiences still flock to anything with the big Y logo emblazoned on it, but this show is a forgettable procedural that fits the brand of shows that CBS is known for, but does not capture what drew people to Yellowstone in the first place.

Marshals premieres on CBS on March 1st.