Plot: As Beth and Rip fight to build a future together – far from the ghosts of Yellowstone – they collide with brutal new realities and a ruthless rival ranch that will stop at nothing to protect its empire. In South Texas, blood runs deeper, forgiveness is fleeting, and the cost of survival might just be your soul.
Review: When Yellowstone debuted with a two-hour premiere episode in 2018, the landscape of television programming shifted. Taylor Sheridan’s brand of family drama, combined with elements of the western genre and melodramatic soap-opera storytelling, resulted in a guilty pleasure featuring the marquee talent and production values of the best shows on the air. Despite behind-the-scenes strife that led to a protracted final season, Yellowstone has afforded Taylor Sheridan the platform to shepherd 10 additional series, including two prequels, 1883 and 1923. With the first Yellowstone sequel spin-off, Marshals, debuting on CBS earlier this year, it had a vastly different formula but lacked the spark of the Kevin Costner-led flagship series. Dutton Ranch, the more organic continuation of the Yellowstone legacy, stays closer to Taylor Sheridan’s storytelling structure but lacks the same immediacy and stakes that fans invested in the original series. Despite the return of Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser in their roles as Beth and Rip, Dutton Ranch is significantly better than Marshals but still not close to capturing the original Yellowstone magic.
Much like how Marshals opened with the off-screen death of Kayce’s wife, Monica, Dutton Ranch opens with a bait-and-switch. In the Yellowstone series finale, Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Rip (Cole Hauser) bought land in Dillon, Montana, to start a new ranch. As this series begins, the ranch goes up in flames, forcing Beth and Rip to start over in Rio Paloma, Texas. While the series does go back and shed additional context on what happened to their original ranch, it focuses on the couple buying an established property coveted by local magnate Beulah Jackson (Annette Bening). Beulah is a formidable woman whose slaughterhouse is part of a larger Texas empire that echoes the control the Duttons exerted in Montana. Things get even more complicated when Beth and Beulah butt heads, leading to tension between the legacy residents of Rio Paloma and the newly arrived Duttons.
Yellowstone wasted no time with death and repercussions through its early episodes, which showed the illegal actions the Dutton clan took to secure their sprawling family property. With 140 years of legacy at the Yellowstone Ranch, the history imbued in that series cemented the power and breadth the Duttons wielded, making it a fitting, rural parallel to urban shows like Succession. Here, Beth’s skills as a litigator and negotiator, along with Rip’s vast expertise as a rancher and cowboy, make the development of their new ranch interesting, but not as interesting as it should be. Beth making a power play with a restaurant manager to buy her top-notch Black Angus steaks, or Rip dealing with a disease that risks his cattle’s health, adds some drama to the day-to-day work of running a working ranch, but audiences want to see where the bodies are buried. Because Rip and Beth don’t have the weight of the Yellowstone behind them any longer and rely on the name recognition tied to Dutton, these first four episodes made available for this review move fairly slowly and don’t build up as much interest as they should.
The most interesting characters in the series are not the ones fans are tuning in to see. Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser are as good as ever as they reprise their roles, but it is the new additions, Annette Bening and Ed Harris, who offer the most interesting side of the story. A Vietnam veteran and experienced veterinarian, Ed Harris portrays Everett McKinney as likable and down to earth with his shared history with Beulah Jackson, setting the potential for deeper exploration of this world. Annette Bening is a formidable matriarch who is on par with the quiet and stoic energy that Kevin Costner brought to playing John Dutton, but she is not given much to do but spout vague commands at her children, led by Roy-Will (Jai Courteney), a drunk who is sent to rehab and does not factor much into these early episodes, and Joaquin (Juan Pablo Raba), who is Beulah’s equivalent of what Beth did for her father. We also get an ongoing romantic subplot between Beth and Rip’s adopted son, Carter (Finn Little), and bad girl Oreana (Natalie Alyn Lind). We also get some interesting moments with Ray McKinnon as a local farmer and Dutton farmhands Zachariah (Marc Menchaca) and Azul (J.R. Villareal).
Created by Chad Feehan, Dutton Ranch boasts Yellowstone creators Taylor Sheridan and Art Linson as executive producers. Frequent Sheridanverse helmers Christina Alexandra Voros, Phil Abraham, Jessica Lowrey, and Greg Yaitanes direct the first season and keep the tone and style consistent with the original series. Feehan, who wrote for Sheridan’s Lawmen: Bass Reeves, as well as the series Ray Donovan and Banshee, leads the writing team with Jacob Forman, J. Todd Scott, Hillary Bettis, KC Scott, Hayley Tibbenham, and Sean Conway rounding out the scribes on the nine-episode run. Brian Tyler and Breton Vivian lend a familiar tone to the series’ score, which has the same grandeur as Yellowstone but with a Texas-Mexico flair. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of the elements of Dutton Ranch, and it feels in line with Yellowstone, but it just never generates momentum in these early episodes. It is fine, but not anything special.
As much as I appreciated revisiting the world of Yellowstone through the eyes of Beth and Rip, Dutton Ranch falls prey to the same issue as the Marshals. Both series are developed from shared DNA, but neither series is what came before it. Both shows are in desperate need of Taylor Sheridan’s oversight, as he delivers his best work when he serves as the sole writer or director. Dutton Ranch may have some stronger episodes in the five entries I have yet to see, but this series does not have anything that jumps out to grab you in the same way that Tulsa King or Landman do. There is not much levity in Dutton Ranch, with the brutal nature and live-or-death stakes of running a cattle ranch resulting in some truly hard-to-watch moments. Yellowstone was at its best when the conflict facing the Duttons was bigger than the ranch. Until Dutton Ranch grows beyond being about Rip and Beth working their land, this series will fail to be much more than an unnecessary spin-off. I want to like this series, but it is not quite there yet. Still, it is way better than the rote and formulaic Marshals.
Dutton Ranch premieres with two episodes on May 15th on Paramount+.
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