Yellowstone’s spinoff starts with a major reveal.

Although some Yellowstone fans would fight me on this, I’d argue Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) was the most interesting Dutton sibling in the recently concluded Taylor Sheridan neo-Western juggernaut. In that show, John Dutton (Kevin Costner) had four kids. Lee (Dave Annable): died in Season 1, Episode 1; we barely knew ye. Jamie (Wes Bentley): adopted son, lawyer, certified snake so irredeemable his character stopped being entertaining long before the show wrapped up. Beth (Kelly Reilly): ride-or-die for John, always seething and saying intense things through her teeth.

Kayce, the youngest, had a soft, almost romantic presence, thanks to Grimes’ wide, liquid eyes and round baby face. The fact that this actor, who looks like a grown-up toddler—Mommy’s favorite boy!—played the Dutton who was an ex–Navy SEAL, a man who would wear a ghillie suit to surveil the ranch’s enemies, or respond to an assassination attempt by flipping over a desk and returning fire from behind it, made for a puzzling contrast. More than one person in charge of casting movies and television thinks Luke Grimes looks like he slings guns for the government—you can catch him as another SEAL in American Sniper, or as one of Joaquin Phoenix’s sheriff’s deputies in Eddington. But on Yellowstone, you watched Kayce while always wondering: Is this man about to whip out a grenade, or cry?

Now Kayce Dutton, a fan-edit favorite, has his own show: Marshals, which premieres on CBS this weekend (and streams on Paramount+ the day after). The series, the first Yellowstone spinoff to hit the air after the conclusion of the original, was once titled Y: Marshals. Its showrunner, Spencer Hudnut, comes from the CBS/Paramount+ show SEAL Team; Sheridan is one of several executive producers. You could watch Marshals without any understanding of what happened at the end of Yellowstone. It’s not a dramatic family saga, but a classic procedural, built around a team of U.S. Marshals that Kayce joins after an old friend from the Navy, played by Logan Marshall-Green, talks him into it.

Mostly, this surprisingly diverse group of hand-picked badasses—these two ex-SEALs, a former undercover ATF agent (Arielle Kebbel), a former tribal cop (Tatanka Means), and a former Bronx cop (Ash Santos)—tackles the kinds of cases that afflict law enforcement in Montana, in the first episode tapping Kayce’s knowledge of the area to uncover two fugitives hiding in the hills. Logan Marshall-Green’s Pete is always coming into the room to report new intel to the team, and then telling them to “jock up” and hit the road—it’s that kind of show.

For committed Yellowstone viewers, watching Marshals may be a bit of a jolt. We went from the drawn-out drama of Season 5, which gave this character a happy ending—Kayce came up with the idea to sell the Duttons’ ranch to the local Native tribe after his father’s death, which was both the right thing to do and set him free from the pressure to continue his family’s legacy—straight to this paint-by-numbers show, full of beautiful actors and actresses wearing black tactical gear and shooting weapons at crooks. Yellowstone was a lot of things, including (by the end) tired of itself, but it could still surprise you with a Sheridan quip, a jarring self-insert, or some sudden, casual act of murder. Watching Marshals, you will know just what you’re getting—with the exception of the surprising charisma of Marshall-Green, whose undereye bags have more life than the rest of the cast put together.

The vestiges of the parent show include the welcome presence of Gil Birmingham and Mo Brings Plenty, who play leaders of the tribe and occasional Kayce allies, and some stray snarky comments (“Duttons have dysfunction in their blood”) about the Duttons’ history in the area. But when you think about Kayce’s situation—the ranch, which formed the basis for every move his father ever made, is gone; his father and wife are dead; his brother Jamie is missing (this is a loose end from Yellowstone that is sure to resurface again down the line)—you realize that this is a man in serious crisis. The old Yellowstone would have taken a stab at exploring the emotional impact of this level of life change; the familiar rhythms of a CBS procedural like Marshals are probably not adequate to the task.

Yes, that’s right: Kayce’s wife, alive and kicking at the end of Yellowstone, is now dead. A certain type of Yellowstone fan loved to hate Monica Dutton, a Native woman from the nearby reservation, played by Kelsey Asbille. Sheridan, the show’s sole writer, put Monica in some impossible positions, giving her some of his classic “annoying” social-justice speeches, sticking her between Kayce and the Duttons (Monica thought Kayce’s family was trouble, trailing violence where they went—she wasn’t wrong), and writing a Season 5 opener that had her driving a car while in labor, getting into an accident, and losing the baby. If one could argue that perhaps the effect of Monica’s presence on the audience was Sheridan’s fault, not a fictional person’s, this idea was lost on the kind of Reddit poster who liked to compare Monica to Meghan Markle: a grating whiner, always complaining about having to live in a palace.

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For a character that occupied so much space—in Kayce’s life, in the minds of aggravated fans, in Sheridan’s vision of Native people—Monica’s demise is remarkably unremarkable. In the first episode of Marshals, we hear that she has died from an illness. We see Tate (Brecken Merrill), Kayce and Monica’s teenage son, holding up her picture at a rally against a mine that the local Broken Rock reservation feels will poison its water supply—which would seem to indicate that Monica may have had the same cancer we hear many people living on the reservation have suffered from. It feels very abrupt for the drama of Kayce and Monica we all went through in Yellowstone—their breaking up and making up; the house they moved into with great optimism and anticipation; the grief they suffered together, after the baby died—to culminate in this: an off-screen death, a grave on a hill, Kayce’s new gravitas when commenting on local politics, because “my wife is Broken Rock,” and everyone knows how she died. The white man who marries a Native woman who dies is a classic figure in American Westerns; finally, Kayce fully fits the trope.

The fans who hated Monica and complained she was dragging Kayce down may actually like Kayce more, now that she’s gone. Or they may find that this new show doesn’t have enough Dutton in it, for their taste. If that’s the case, they could just wait: Marshals is only the first post-Yellowstone spinoff by a hair. In two weeks, we get The Madison, a present-day spinoff showrun by Sheridan himself and starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell. And there are two more in the pipeline, including one focused on Beth and her husband, Rip. One thing about Duttons: They never really die.

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