When it comes to the Yellowstone shows, for many reasons, Marshals is very different from the rest. While Luke Grimes returned to play Kayce Dutton, the series airs on CBS instead of the Paramount Network or Paramount+, it has significantly longer seasons than the other shows, and it’s not just a Western, it’s a legal procedural too. So, altogether, this series about one of the younger members of the Dutton family has to deal with a unique challenge the other projects in this universe probably don’t face.
The challenge I’m referring to has to do with the number of episodes the Marshals team makes in a single season and the number of days they have to do it. I always knew network TV works at a pace that’s very different from a streaming show. However, it became abundantly clear when I spoke to Logan Marshall-Green, who plays Cal, about what’s gotten easier since Season 1 and the new challenges they have to deal with as Season 2 airs on the 2026 TV schedule. Here’s what he had to say:
Well, now that I think we all got our sea legs from Season 1, you realize just how much work is going to have to be put in week to week to put out seven-day episodes. I mean, this show is more like a 15-day. These scripts are more like 15-day scripts, and yet we're doing them in less than half. And so there's a certain constitution and pace.
Network TV moves fast, and a lot of the time, shows that air on it are putting out two times more episodes per season than a streaming show.
To put that into perspective, let’s compare the two projects about the modern-day Duttons that started airing after Yellowstone ended.
Kayce’s show, Marshals, had 13 episodes in its first season, and it notably didn’t start airing until March of this year, meaning it began in the mid-season and had a shorter run than many network shows. Season 2, which premiered about four months after Season 1 ended, will be 20 episodes long, according to Marshall-Green. Dutton Ranch, Beth and Rip’s spinoff, premiered for those with a Paramount+ subscription this year as well. It has nine episodes, and its return date for Season 2 is unknown.
During Season 2, Marshals will put out 11 more episodes than Dutton Ranch. So, yeah, they have to work at a wicked fast pace, and it’s challenging. Speaking about how hard this is, Marshall-Green told me that he has to protect his acting process while trying to keep up with their schedule:
I'm somebody who – I have a certain process. I don't want to get bad habits due to a certain schedule, so it's important for me to stay on my process. And I realize that I'm going to have to put even more work in to keep up, to walk on set ready to be playful and let go of the work instead of just keep memorizing lines and spitting it out in front of camera. That's just not why I do the acting. So I think the pace of work has been an important realization.
To make a show like Marshals, it makes sense that the actors have to adopt a different mentality to get through it. They have to sprint through each episode while also essentially doing a marathon worth of TV. The other Yellowstone shows didn’t or don’t have to. I mean, Yellowstone often had ten-episode seasons (you can stream those with a Peacock subscription). Meanwhile, 1883 had ten episodes, and 1923’s first season had eight episodes while Season 2 got seven.
Those shorter shows are by no means easy to work on. We know just how tough Dutton Ranch was to make. However, the Marshals crew is working with a different beast…network TV, and that means it’s shooting a lot of content in half the time.
So, to see this hard-working and fast team in action, you can catch new episodes of Marshals every Sunday on CBS at 8 p.m. ET.
