Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 3, 2026
Look: Somewhat ashamedly, I’ve seen every episode of Yellowstone and every Yellowstone spin-off. I’m not going to try to justify it. I’m a white, middle-aged Dad. It’s a genetic flaw. And I’ll probably continue to watch the Yellowstone spin-offs as long as they keep making them. I’m not proud.
But I’m not going to watch another episode of Marshals, mostly because it borrows some Yellowstone characters and is set in the Yellowstone world, but Marshals is not Yellowstone. It’s a CBS procedural, flattened into another Fire Country or CSI: Montana. It’s clearly going to be a case-of-the-week format where these U.S. Marshals hunt down bad people and refuse to advance the plot.
And that’s fine. In fact, I suspect the average Yellowstone fan probably likes Fire Country and would be just fine watching a version of Yellowstone without what made Yellowstone watchable: the melodrama. Westerns are just soap operas with guns for people afraid to admit they like soap operas.
That said, it is worth watching the premiere episode just to find out what happens to Kayce Dutton, just in case you thought the quiet ending for him in Yellowstone was unjust. Recall that he and his wife, Monica, took their son and moved out to the outskirts of the ranch, to a plot of land left to them. They were done with the ranch, done with the Duttons, and done with that life.
Marshals doesn’t bring them back so much as it blows up their lives and sends them on a different path. Monica is dead. Sadly. In the time between Yellowstone and Marshals, she succumbed to a fast-acting cancer attributed to toxic waste on the reservation. How convenient, because the opening episode deals with bad guys who try to take out Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) for his role in the toxic waste scandal, given that a number of people died of that cancer.
Rainwater is injured in a bombing. The Marshals, which now include Kayce Dutton — joining an old military buddy played by Logan Marshall-Green (the Dollar Store Tom Hardy) — take out the bad guy. Rainwater ultimately lives to participate in another case-of-the-week, and Kayce spends the final seconds of the episode explaining to his late wife’s gravestone that he’s decided to forge a new path while a country song plays in the background. “I miss you, baby … the best part of me died with you.”
It’ll probably be one of the last times the show ever speaks of Monica. The Duttons and their drama won’t contribute much to Marshals because most of them are either dead or have moved away to start their own Yellowstone spin-offs, like Dutton Ranch, which premieres this fall and follows Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler in the aftermath of Yellowstone. It’ll probably be terrible. I’ll watch every episode.
