Yellowstone‘s Marshals is breaking records as CBS’ most-watched scripted debut — beating out Justin Hartley‘s hit series Tracker.
The network announced that the series premiere of Marshals, which aired on Sunday, March 1, was viewed by 9.52 million viewers, making it the most-watched new scripted series premiere without a football lead-in since 2018.
Marshals was also the No. 1 series premiere in the 2025-26 broadcast season. CBS’ Sunday night lineup brought in 7.21 million viewers for 60 Minutes, 9.52 million viewers for Marshals, 8.29 million viewers for Tracker and 4 million viewers for Watson.
Marshals, Tracker and 60 Minutes became the top three shows on TV for the week. Tracker came in right behind the Yellowstone spinoff as the No. 2 program — up from its fall average.
Hartley’s Tracker previously scored wins for the network following its February 2024 debut, becoming the most-watched broadcast premiere in three years. NCIS’ final episode with Mark Harmon held the title in September 2021.
Tracker’s viewership only increased from there, with CBS revealing in December 2024 that the series averaged 18.2 million viewers per episode, according to Paramount+ and broadcast measurements.
When the hit CBS series returned later in 2024 for its second season, it brought in 8.3 million total viewers, going up nearly 10 percent from the season 1 finale. The season 2 premiere also marked the show’s highest audience since the series debuted after the Super Bowl.
Tracker was the 2023-24 TV season’s most-watched entertainment series, ranking as the No. 1 show since Survivor premiered in 2000. Variety previously reported in 2024 that 15 of the slots on its annual list of the year’s 100 most-watched primetime telecasts belonged to Tracker. The next year, Tracker scored 19 episodes on the year’s top 100 primetime telecasts, which was more than anything outside of the NFL.
Marshals, meanwhile, is a spinoff of Yellowstone, which aired from 2018 to 2024. It introduced Us to Kayce (Luke Grimes) as a former U.S. Navy SEAL who became the new owner and operator of his family’s Yellowstone Ranch. He sold the property by the finale, but there was still more story to tell.
Before the premiere, Grimes, 42, addressed the criticism that Kayce isn’t a Dutton who deserved his own spinoff.
“I’m my own worst critic,” he told Entertainment Weekly in February. “I was like, ‘If you take a poll of who people want to have a spinoff, I don’t know if Kayce would be top of that list. I think there’s other characters that they would rather see.'”
Grimes used that as motivation, adding, “So there was a fire under me. Like, it has to be good. If it’s not good, I’d rather not do it. We tried really hard to make sure that any of the original Yellowstone fans would have something to grasp onto.”
He continued: “But if you’d never seen Yellowstone, we wanted this show to make sense on its own as well. I think we accomplished that as much as we possibly could.”
Marshals airs on CBS Sundays at 8 p.m. ET, while Tracker follows at 9 p.m. ET.
