Marshals Season 1 Review – Kayce Dutton Is Back

I enjoyed Yellowstone but somewhere around the third season, halfway into it, I had lost track of it. Paramount+ had a habit of bleeding one episode into the next and before I knew it, I wasn’t entirely sure which season I was watching anymore.

One character I always liked, however, was Kayce Dutton and so getting Luke Grimes his own spin-off immediately had my attention.
Marshals takes Kayce away from the Yellowstone and into a very different world. He’s living a quieter life with his son Tate when his friend Pete Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green) drags him into a job with the U.S. Marshals. Kayce initially helps out unofficially before eventually joining the team, and with the opening episodes doing a good job of proving that while he might be wearing a different badge, he’s still very much a Dutton.

Luke Grimes slips back into the role effortlessly. Kayce has always been an interesting character because he’s capable of being a decent man while carrying everything that comes with his family name. Becoming a Marshal gives him the opportunity to operate on the right side of the law, but Marshals never strips away that underlying question of how far Kayce will go when his family or the Dutton legacy is threatened.

There’s some of the strongest material coming from the place where Kayce isn’t immediately trusted by everyone around him and the weight of the Dutton name. He has to prove that he belongs rather than walk into another position of power because of who he is and Grimes’ portrayal of the conflict is done brilliantly without suddenly flipping Kayce into a different man.

Pete Calvin quickly became one of my favourite characters and someone I was already rooting for from the get-go. Logan Marshall-Green does a fantastic job of portraying him but it’s Calvin’s loyalty that makes the character stand out. He’s fiercely loyal to his team and particularly to Kayce, and the friendship between the two becomes one of the strongest relationships in the season. You genuinely believe that when things go bad, Calvin is the type of person you’d want standing by your side.

The rest of the supporting team doesn’t miss out either. Arielle Kebbel, Ash Santos and Tatanka Means give the unit enough personality that it doesn’t become simply The Kayce Dutton Show.

Means is particularly good as Miles Kittle. He’s not presented as some indestructible, gung-ho lawman but there’s a sincerity to him that makes him instantly likeable. His storyline involving the drugs affecting girls around Broken Rock becomes more personal and eventually gets him into serious trouble, giving the season one of its more emotional threads.
What I also liked about Marshals is that it doesn’t lose the darker side of Yellowstone.

One of my favourite episodes involves a prison escape during brutal winter conditions, with Kayce and the team hunting an escaped prisoner through the mountains. The fact that the prisoner used to work around the Dutton ranch allows some old secrets to bleed into Kayce’s new life.

Including the train station.

Anyone who watched Yellowstone knows why that’s a dangerous subject. Logan Marshall-Green’s character starts asking questions and the situation becomes considerably more interesting when the escaped man later turns up dead. Marshals doesn’t need to continually drag characters and storylines over from its parent show but moments like this remind us that Kayce can’t just put the Dutton past behind him because he’s wearing a Marshal badge now.

The season also finds room to incorporate Kayce’s military past, including the arrival of Garrett, an old SEAL friend who comes to the ranch to say farewell. These scenes remind us that there’s much more history behind Kayce than simply being John Dutton’s son, and Grimes has always been best when the quieter side of his character is allowed to come out.

By the final stretch, Marshals really hits its stride. The action picks up, several of the team’s personal storylines start colliding with the main investigation and the season finishes considerably stronger than it started. There are enough loose ends left behind to make me genuinely interested in where these characters go next.

Marshals works without feeling like Yellowstone with a different badge slapped onto it. Kayce still carries the Dutton name, the history and some of the questionable morality that comes with it but putting him into the U.S. Marshals gives Luke Grimes a new environment to explore the character.
I came for Kayce Dutton but characters like Pete Calvin gave me a reason to invest myself into the rest of the team.

By the end, I wanted another season of Marshals and it’s on its way.