The Yellowstone spinoff starring Luke Grimes currently is ranked as the top new series premiere of the 2025-26 broadcast season.
Well that certainly didn’t take very long.
Marshals, the new weekly drama in which actor Luke Grimes reprises his Yellowstone role as Kayce Dutton, has been picked up for a second season by CBS after the airing of only two Season 1 episodes.
And for good reason: The rapid renewal, according to Deadline.com, “comes after the premiere episode became the most-watched network original series premiere without a football lead in since 2017 when another spinoff of a long-running show, The Big Bang Theory spinoff Young Sheldon, premiered.”
Better still, the audience just kept on growing.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Marshals “opened with 9.52 million viewers for its initial airing on CBS March 1 and grew to an eye-popping 20.6 million viewers after a week of streaming and other delayed viewing.
“For comparison, that’s about 6.5 million more viewers than the top non-sports series this season (Tracker at 14.07 million) averages over a week of cross-platform viewing.”
And while delayed viewing numbers for the second episode, which aired March 8, have yet to be tallied, “its on-air audience of 8.4 million held up very nicely from the premiere.”
Very, very nicely.
“Marshals delivered a breakout performance,” CBS Entertainment president Amy Reisenbach said in statement, “capturing a massive audience across platforms and quickly establishing itself as one of TV’s most powerful new series.
“The overwhelming viewer response speaks to the strength of the Yellowstone world, the bold character-driven storytelling from the creative team, and the dynamic cast performances led by Luke Grimes.”
Marshals picks up several months after events in the Yellowstone series finale. During the interim between the shows, Kayce lost his wife Monica to cancer, and became increasingly adrift and directionless. As the new series begins, he surprises no one more than himself when he accepts an offer by an old friend to become a lawman.
The official Marshals logline: “With the Yellowstone Ranch behind him, 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 — Pete Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green), Belle Skinner (Arielle Kebbel), Andrea Cruz (Ash Santos), and Miles Kittle (Tatanka Means) — 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, which for Kayce includes his son, Tate (Brecken Merrill); and his confidants Mo (Mo Brings Plenty) and Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) from the Broken Rock reservation.”
As Grimes told C&I: “I think the arc in the original show was [Kayce] trying to heal from that trauma, and that sort of PTSD, from things he had to do at war. And that was part of why he was so concerned about the life that he wanted with Monica, right? The life that he wanted was very simple — he wanted his little piece of land with some cattle, and he wanted to cowboy and be with his family. And he got that at the end of Yellowstone.
“But obviously at the beginning of [Marshals], that has been taken away from him. And so he has no choice but to find a new path for himself. And that’s sort of the impetus for the start of our show.”
If Monica were still around, Grimes said, “there would be no reason for [Kayce] to do this. I think he would’ve felt like why put himself in harm’s way and possibly jeopardize this beautiful life that he’s carved out for himself. But obviously that life has gone away, and he can’t sit around and do nothing forever. He’s dealing with a lot of grief. And I think this is a way for him to have some purpose in his life.”
