Roush Review: Kayce’s ‘Yellowstone’ Spinoff ‘Marshals’ Is a Work in Progress

Marshals

Matt's Rating:

“It may look like God’s country, but devil’s running free out here,” U.S. Marshals team leader Pete “Cal” Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green) tells his former Navy SEAL buddy Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) while gazing upon the gorgeous but violence-prone Montana prairie.

Does Cal realize who he’s talking to? As one of the Yellowstone Duttons, Kayce has seen more than his share of homegrown hell over the years, a witness to the sort of down-and-dirty domestic conflict that makes the ex-soldier’s psychological combat scars pale by comparison. Likewise, the Yellowstone spinoff Marshals (the first spinoff from the Taylor Sheridan universe to premiere on network TV instead of a streamer) numbs the senses with weekly shootouts and other forms of Wild Modern West carnage, but none of it is as hair-raising or memorable as watching his spitfire sister Beth (Kelly Reilly) take down a rival on the original series.

With the taciturn Kayce at center stage, that most melancholy of cowboys (for good reason), Marshals is for all of its action a more muted affair, with everyone on Cal’s team underplaying to a fault. What distinguishes this procedural from the CBS norm is its mournful tone as it looks upon a vanishing wilderness, and its soft-spoken sharp-shooting hero, haunted by his fractious family’s corrupting residue and more tangible personal loss.

Sonja Flemming/CBS

“My life’s been kill-or-be-killed for too long,” Kayce tells Cal, who’s trying to recruit the former Livestock Commissioner to join his elite Marshals unit. You know he’ll succeed — otherwise there would be no show — just as you know Kayce will rise to the occasion, rushing and riding into danger and playing as dirty as needs be to win the day. As Mo (Mo Brings Plenty) of the Broken Rock reservation observes, “Violence has a way of finding the Duttons.” (Lingering over the series is the ongoing mystery of his brother Jamie Dutton’s “disappearance.”)

Their presidentially appointed boss (TV veteran Brett Cullen) is no fan of bringing one of the controversial Duttons on board, but Cal insists. There’s no doubt the Marshals have their hands full in the opening episodes, dealing with bombers, white nationalists, gang members, drug dealers, and, most provocatively and topically, a tense dispute between Broken Rock, led by chairman Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham), and the government over a proposed rare earth mineral mining site that threatens to poison the reservation with toxins. A civil protest leads to a perceived assassination attempt, but who’s the target: a visiting politician or Rainwater?

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When he’s not putting out criminal fires, often resorting to horseback to remind us that this is, after all, a neo-Western, Kayce tends to his ranching duties at East Camp, wrangling a wild stallion and fishing with his equally closed-off son Tate (Brecken Merrill). These scenes are generally more satisfying than watching him uneasily bond with his bland new colleagues, which include Miles (Takanka Means), a former tribal cop and ex-Marine who doesn’t relish killing people; brash Bronx babe Andrea (Ash Santos), who’s not crazy about saddling up; and Belle (Rescue: Hi-Surf‘s Arielle Kebbel), who left the ATF to work closer to home with her well-heeled family.

Whether any of them will emerge as fully formed characters is anyone’s guess. Marshals is obviously focused for now on Kayce’s story of finding new purpose. As a companion piece to the network’s other lone-wolf crime drama, Tracker, it’s a decent fit. And while I know she’s working on her own Dutton Ranch spinoff, I can’t help hoping Beth will show up at some point to raise the temperature on this work-in-progress crew.

Marshals, Series Premiere, Sunday, March 1, 8/7c, CBS