Since introducing his Yellowstone TV series, starring Kevin Costner, in 2018, Taylor Sheridan has made a very successful career of building dramas around veteran stars. Now Sheridan has a new official sequel series — Marshals, on CBS — and a seemingly unrelated series, The Madison, that I suspect will connect to the Yellowstone storyline before too long.
The Madison is a six-episode drama, starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell. It streamed half its episodes when it premiered March 14 on Paramount+ and has been renewed already for a second season. All six episodes were written by Sheridan and directed by Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed many episodes of both Yellowstone and its prequel, 1883.
The Madison is set up as a sort of dramatic Green Acres, and presents Pfeiffer and Russell as Stacy and Preston, wealthy New Yorkers who are close to approaching their 50th wedding anniversary. They have daughters, and granddaughters, and Preston also has a cabin and some land he shares with his brother Paul in Madison River Valley, Mont. He goes there when he can to relax; when he does, his wife Stacy stays behind in the city.
Before long, Stacy decides to take her daughters and granddaughters to see the Montana cabins for the first time. The whole family is there: One older divorced daughter with two girls — a teenager, and one in grade school — and the younger married daughter, who has just been mugged.
The Madison, like Yellowstone and all its prequel series, is all about legacy and responsibility and relationships — but focusing on the women instead of the men. Some scenes and concepts in The Madison are absurd in the extreme, like the idea that the streets of New York are more dangerous than any wild west. But there also are moments of true beauty and calm — and the valley setting itself, I suspect, eventually will link to previous series in the Yellowstone canon.
Fly-fishing figures prominently here, as it does in most other Yellowstone-connected series — but Sheridan and The Madison, with Russell fully enjoying the peace of the river, nails the emotion. The new CBS sequel, Marshals, which also has a male-bonding fly-fishing scene, does not.
Marshals, which premiered March 1 on CBS, stars Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, one of the sons of Costner's John Dutton from Yellowstone. Sheridan co-wrote the first episodes, but Marshals isn't nearly as good a series as The Madison. It finds a way to get Kayce hired as a U.S. Marshal, but mostly to give the character a chance to run around with more advanced weaponry. And his relationship with his son Tate, played by Brecken Merrill from Yellowstone, is explored a lot less credibly, and dramatically, than the maternal dynamics on The Madison.
Marshals adds to the Yellowstone legacy, with its allusions to long-established storylines like a seventh-generation land surrender, and modern clashes that echo deadly standoffs of old. But it's The Madison, like 1883 and 1923, that brings the best out of Sheridan. And bringing back veteran movie stars Pfeiffer and Russell? Even in a modern Western, that's a real Bonanza.
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