Published Aug 4, 2026, 7:42 PM EDT
Michael John Petty is a Senior Author for Collider who spends his days writing, in fellowship with his local church, and enjoying each new day with his wife and daughters. At Collider, he writes features, reviews, recaps, and conducts interviews. In addition to writing about stories, Michael has told a few of his own. His novella, The Beast of Bear-tooth Mountain,** **was released in 2023. His Western short story, The Devil’s Left Hand, received the Spur Award for “Best Western Short Fiction” from the Western Writers of America in 2025. Michael currently resides in North Idaho with his growing family.
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For those who just can’t wait for Marshals to return, we have some news to whet your appetite just a little longer. The Yellowstone spin-off series follows Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) as he trades his usual cowboy spurs for a U.S. Marshals badge, joining his SEAL brother Pete “Cal” Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green) in his Montana-based operation. While the first season left some to be desired, fans will be happy to hear that Season 2 appears to be correcting a Yellowstone mistake by expanding on Cal’s personal struggles in a way that we never quite got with Kevin Costner’s John Dutton…
In a recent sit-down with **Perri Nemiroff **on an episode of Collider Forces, Logan Marshall-Green teased the second season of Marshals with a small taste of what’s to come: namely that Cal will have to come to terms with the cancer diagnosis he received in Season 1. In the first season’s penultimate episode, “The Devil At Home,” Cal finally revealed to Belle (Arielle Kebbel) that doctors found a Pancoast tumor on his lung — and the prognosis is not good. After suffering in silence for some time, Cal is going to have to deal with his pain in the show’s sophomore year, which could not only affect his future with his daughter, Maddie (Morgan Lindholm), but also his role on the team going forward. The fact that Marshals isn’t trying to hide Cal’s predicament, nor keep him from actually having to wrestle through it, is a pivot in the right direction that further separates the CBS series from its neo-Western predecessor.
The show that claimed the most of your answers is the world you were built for. If two tied, both are shown — you’re complicated enough to straddle two Sheridan universes.
You are a Dutton — or you might as well be. You understand that some things are worth protecting at any cost, and that the modern world’s indifference to history, to land, to legacy, is not something you’re willing to accept quietly. You lead from the front, you carry your family’s weight without complaint, and when someone threatens what’s yours, you don’t escalate — you finish it. You’re not cruel. But you are absolute. In Yellowstone’s world, that combination of ferocity and loyalty doesn’t make you a villain. It makes you the only thing standing between everything that matters and everyone who wants to take it.
You thrive in the chaos of high-stakes negotiation, where the money is enormous, the margins are thin, and the wrong word in the wrong room can cost everyone everything. You’re a fixer — the person called when a situation is already on fire and needs someone with the nerve to walk into it. West Texas oil country rewards exactly what you are: sharp, adaptable, unsentimental, and absolutely clear-eyed about what people want and what they’ll do to get it. You’re not naive enough to think this world is fair. You’re smart enough to be the one deciding who it’s fair to.
You are a Dwight Manfredi — someone who has served their time, paid their dues, and arrived somewhere unexpected with nothing but their reputation and their wits. You adapt without losing yourself. You build loyalty through respect rather than fear, though you’re not above reminding people that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Tulsa King is for people who are still standing when everyone assumed they’d be finished — who find, in an unfamiliar place, that they’re more capable than the world gave them credit for. You don’t need a throne. You build one, wherever you happen to land.
You carry the weight of a system that is broken by design, and you do it anyway — because someone has to, and because you’re the only one positioned to do it without the whole thing collapsing. Mike McLusky’s world is for people who are comfortable operating where there are no good options, only less catastrophic ones. You speak every language: law enforcement, criminal, political, human. That fluency makes you invaluable and it makes you a target. You’ve made your peace with both. Mayor of Kingstown belongs to people who understand that keeping the peace is not the same as being at peace — and who do the job regardless.
On Yellowstone, John Dutton went through a period where both he and the audience believed that he was dying of cancer. The old rancher mostly ignored his illness, never going to the doctor and refusing to let it stop him from his daily routine. What it did do was create an urgency to his battle for the land that was sadly lost when it was revealed to be nothing more than a stomach ulcer. Even during the patch where we thought John was suffering from some sort of cancer, Yellowstone never really detailed his illness or his battle with it. It was simply a plot device meant to kickstart the wildfire that spread rapidly as he battled all those who would sooner buy up and partition his land out from under him. Fortunately, **Marshals doesn’t appear to be making that same mistake.
It’s based on a creator’s real story, one of the creator’s real stories. So we’re going to go after it and we’re still in the middle of it. And I couldn’t tell you, to be completely honest. Those kinds of things I don’t want to know. Just want to live it human. It’s the best part about TV. It’s the closest out of all the mediums to life, which is, you don’t know what you’re getting handed next. But it’s a lot more of the same when it comes to the massive amounts of set pieces, action balanced with character. A lot of character.
Knowing that Marshals won’t just be using Cal’s diagnosis as a plot device (and rather turning it into an opportunity to develop his character) is great news. While John Dutton’s sickness was used to ignite the events of Yellowstone, there’s little evidence that the battle humbled or changed him in any way — in most respects, he was the same man both before and after his “cancer” than he was during. This could be where the spin-off has a chance to further cement itself as a different sort of neo-Western tale, by adding in that element of personal experience that could make Cal’s second season arc more authentic by comparison. Marshals lost a little steam by the end of the first season (despite being a streaming success), but perhaps something like this could help things pick up going into Season 2.
Marshals is available for streaming on Paramount+.
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2026 - 2026-00-00