A director from the Yellowstone spinoff Marshals is defending the show’s decision not to explain Monica’s shocking offscreen death.
“This is why it didn’t strike me as a pilot. There was no exposition about Monica’s death in the pilot,” Greg Yaitanes, who directed the series premiere, recently told Collider about the introduction to the CBS show.
The plan was to not get into detail about what happened to Monica (Kelsey Asbille).
“It was exactly what it would be like a year or two after the death of the character,” he continued. “You would be talking about the circumstances around it vs. talking about the thing.”
Yaitanes expressed gratitude to Asbille, adding, “What was really important was that we had her picture for the protest, and she was lovely to give us permission for that. That was a really critical piece to that scene. That’s what I thought that scene was about.”
Paramount Network’s Yellowstone, which aired from 2018 to 2024, introduced Us to Kayce (Luke Grimes) and his wife, Monica, who remained at the center of the show until the finale. After teaching at a local school on the Broken Rock Indian Reservation, Monica went on to become a professor at Montana State University while navigating life with Kayce, who moved them back to the Yellowstone Ranch following his past tension with dad John (Kevin Costner).
Following John’s death, Kayce, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, became the new owner and operator of the Yellowstone Ranch. Kayce and Monica ended the show alive — and were still together — before Marshals began.
When the series premiered in March, however, fans learned Monica died after battling cancer.
“My first question when I got the scripts, as I was reading them, was, ‘How are they going to undo Kayce’s happy ending?’ He really had a beautiful finish at the end of Yellowstone proper,” Yaitanes explained. “And I was really moved to see, ‘OK, life has gone in another direction.’ I almost feel like [episode 2] is really the pilot, and [the pilot] was the bridge between Yellowstone and Marshals.”
Yaitanes called the second episode “the show you’re going to be watching.”
“Immediately, being a single dad to a son, which was something I could personally connect to, having been a single dad at various times in my life, I felt that the way it was handled and the humanity in which it was handled was really beautiful, and I wanted to be part of it,” he shared.
Showrunner Spencer Hudnut has also addressed the decision to kill off Monica.
“Kayce had such a perfect ending in Yellowstone,” he told TVLine in March. “His dreams had finally come true. As we were trying to figure out how to tell the next chapter in Kayce’s story, it felt like he really needed to be shaken out of that. Unfortunately, tragedy tends to find Kayce, so something bad was going to happen for him one way or the other. It just sort of played out that it was going to be Monica.”
Hudnut said Monica’s death will continue to drive Kayce, adding, “To me, Monica is really guiding Kayce through this first episode, trying to help him find his new path. And if you actually break it down, Tate is at that rally to honor his mother, and Kayce goes there to protect Tate. So if not for Monica, Kayce never would have been in that position and may not have found this path.”
He concluded: “We really wanted to be respectful of the way that we said goodbye to her. I also didn’t want to step on the ending of Yellowstone, because what they had was a beautiful ending. Unfortunately, real life intervened.”
Marshals airs on CBS Sundays at 8 p.m. ET.
