‘Marshals: A Yellowstone Story’ Review: Luke Grimes Leads a Workmanlike Spinoff

You can take plenty of shots at the universe Taylor Sheridan built around his flagship show Yellowstone, but one thing is hard to deny: his series usually have a certain epic sweep. Beneath their familiar TV drama conventions, they often feel like they’re telling a bigger story about the United States itself. That was true of the original series starring Kevin Costner and of its prequels, 1883 and 1923. The first proper sequel, however, has very little of that grand scale. Instead, it plays more like a workmanlike spinoff that follows one of Yellowstone’s central characters but does so from a far more grounded—and sometimes surprisingly ordinary—place.

The show mostly stands on its own, but a quick Yellowstone recap helps put things in context for newcomers. Luke Grimes plays Kayce Dutton, the youngest son of John Dutton (Costner), the patriarch who led the original series through its five seasons. Without spoiling too much—though anyone watching Marshals will learn it soon enough—Kayce is one of the few family members still active around the Montana ranch the Duttons owned, ran, and fought to keep for more than a century. But Kayce was never the typical heir with big ambitions. He’s a troubled former Marine who saw combat overseas and has always tried to carve out his own path, including marrying a Native American woman and raising a son with her.

Marshals doesn’t spend much time revisiting the grand Dutton family saga. Instead, it focuses on what happens after Kayce becomes a widower—his wife Monica dies of cancer before the series begins—and now lives with his teenage son Tate (Brecken Merrill) on what remains of the family land after giving much of it back to the Broken Rock reservation. Kayce still spends plenty of time staring out across the Montana horizon, weighed down by war trauma and the tragedies that have shaped his life. But the show’s real focus is his new job—one that, in his case, feels almost therapeutic.

Recruited by Pete Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green), a former Navy SEAL buddy, Kayce joins the U.S. Marshals Service, a small but highly active team tackling crime across a wide-open region where far more is happening than meets the eye. Week after week, the series follows the cases this unit takes on, many of them loosely connected and gradually revealing the area’s criminal underbelly: drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, political attacks, armed militia groups, and the like.

There’s some room along the way for echoes of the old Yellowstone storyline—two familiar faces from the original series, played by Gil Birmingham and Brett Cullen, make appearances—but at its core the show is a classic procedural. Sheridan himself isn’t the creator here, and it shows. Much of the drama revolves around the mechanics of this new team Kayce joins: the New York-born Latina Andrea Cruz (Ash Santos), whose style sticks out in this part of the country; the seasoned Belle Skinner (Arielle Kebbel); the rookie Miles Kittle (Tatanka Means), who comes from the reservation; and Pete himself, the charismatic leader and tactical brain of the group.

Between action scenes, Marshals checks in with the crew at the local bar—drinking, listening to country music, dealing with romantic complications—or back at their “office” while they plan the next operation. Everything feels extremely routine: the characters, the dialogue, the conflicts. It’s formula television through and through, closer to the long-running network procedural tradition—think NCIS and its endless spinoffs—than to the spirit of Yellowstone itself.

Sheridan’s shows may have their limits and clichés—many of which are visible in parallel series from that universe like Tulsa King or Landman—but they’ve usually carried a larger ambition, a sense of melancholy grandeur about the American West and the people trying to survive in it. Here, only fragments of that remain: a cowboy staring at the horizon, a lone wolf crossing the frame. The rest is business as usual.