Eight years after the premiere of Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan’s scripts have become so formulaic that it’s fair to wonder if they aren’t being penned by an AI assistant via prompts like “herding cattle,” “roping steers,” “horseback riding at sunrise,” “greedy corporate villains,” “beer-drinking at honky-tonk bars,” “homicide cover-ups at night,” and “revealing shots of young blondes’ derrieres.”
Those and a host of additional hackneyed elements are present in Dutton Ranch (May 15, on Paramount+), a sequel-by-way-of-spinoff to its flagship ancestor that follows Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) as they strut, brood, and intensely love each other while attempting to forge a new path for themselves and their 19-year-old son Carter (Finn Little).
Executive-produced by Sheridan, created by Chad Feehan, and co-starring Annette Bening and Ed Harris, it’s another neo-Western soap opera that follows its predecessors’ rough-and-tumble template to a tee—except that, by sidestepping the usual culture-war claptrap, it proves the most straightforward and satisfying franchise entry since the original.
Dutton Ranch opens with Beth and Rip galloping across their sun-drenched Montana ranch, after which they lie against a tree and marvel at the “quiet” they’ve finally achieved. That peace, however, is short-lived, as their property promptly goes up in flames, costing them everything.
Six months later, they’ve started rebuilding their lives with Carter in Rio Paloma, Texas, having purchased a well-known ranch and turned it into Dutton Ranch, where they intend to enjoy a happily-ever-after by selling beef and staying out of trouble.
Wouldn’t you know it, trouble finds them almost instantaneously, with Rip and his employee Azul (J.R. Villarreal) having a contentious gas station run-in with the goofily named Rob-Will (Jai Courtney), and Beth learning that the town’s bigwig rancher, Beulah (Bening), won’t slaughter her cows, thereby putting Dutton Ranch’s fortunes in jeopardy.
These separate clashes are, predictably, intertwined, as Rob-Will is Beulah’s son. And as he demonstrates in the premiere’s opening scene, he’s a hot-tempered psychopath, committing a crime that he subsequently must cover up, and which infuriates Beulah and his brother Joaquin (Juan Pablo Raba), who’s the business-minded sibling tasked with keeping their empire afloat.
Dutton Ranch lays this out with the same overwrought melodrama that is Yellowstone’s bread and butter, such as when Beth, gazing at the horizon on their new land, muses, “Sky doesn’t stop here. It’s like you can see forever,” and Rip solemnly replies, “Well, baby, if you look hard enough, maybe you can.”
As before, Beth and Rip are made for each other because they’re tough as nails—rugged, unflappable, intimidating, and willing to do whatever it takes to survive—and yet, deep down, also quietly vulnerable and affectionate. Recognizing that his leads are the entire reason for this endeavor’s existence, Feehan leans heavily on them, giving them plentiful opportunities to both strut their steely stuff and hold each other in tender embraces.
You can tell who the good guys are in Dutton Ranch by who’s trying to save someone or something, with Rip rescuing a calf from fire, Beth convincing veterinarian Everett (Harris) to spare and treat a wounded horse, and Carter defending Oreana (Natalie Alyn Lind) from her abusive boyfriend—the last of which nets him, in perfectly convenient fashion, a hot-to-trot girlfriend.
It’s all a lot of familiar selfless gallantry and stoic posturing, and Reilly and Hauser’s commanding presences, and comfort in their characters’ boots, give the material its pleasurably self-serious potency.
Directed and shot by Yellowstone vet Christina Alexandra Voros (among others), Dutton Ranch eschews the CBS-grade procedural format of Marshalls, looking and feeling just like its most hallowed ancestor. In its initial four episodes—which were all that were provided to press in advance—it saddles its protagonists with a conventional array of dilemmas: Rip finds something on his land that should not be there and threatens to get him into hot water; Beth travels to Dallas to solidify meat-distribution deals; and the two run afoul of Beulah and her clan, who are uninterested in ceding figurative or literal territory to competitors.
The show plays by tried-and-true rules, although mercifully, it does so without the corny liberal and urbanite caricatures that Sheridan has long used as foils for his “real” American men and women.
Bening is a more or less convincing villain as Beulah, even if her Texas twang could use a bit more work, and Harris does a compelling creaky-war-horse routine as Everett, whose understated, no-nonsense approach to life (and its uglier sides) helps him become fast friends with Beth and Rip. Everett’s medical services are eventually required on the Dutton Ranch courtesy of a crisis that may not be accidental, thereby setting up what looks like the season’s main battle.
Simultaneously, Carter and Oreana’s bond is complicated by both her relatives, against whom she’s constantly rebelling, and his frustration with Beth and Rip for boxing him out of the family’s big-picture decisions.
There’s nothing novel about Dutton Ranch’s celebration of Rip (and, by extension, all cowboys) as a man’s man who doesn’t suffer fools lightly, isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, and sincerely cherishes America’s unspoiled wide-open spaces. In the face of danger, he seethes and acts, and confronted by tragedy and hardship, he feels, grimly and purely.
Beth is cut from a similar hard-shell/soft-interior cloth, and Reilly’s larger-than-life performance remains the best thing to come out of Yellowstone, elevating these proceedings regardless of the hoary turns they take.
Ex-cons in search of redemption, parents struggling with wayward children, and righteous heroes doing questionable things for the right reasons are all components of Dutton Ranch, which operates from the principle that there’s no need to fix what audiences believe was never broken in the first place.
Given the tremendous success of Marshalls and The Madison (a stand-alone Sheridan affair that began life as a Yellowstone-adjacent saga), it’s hardly shocking that the series stays the course. What is unexpected, though, is how well that works.
No-frills, muscular, and just the right amount of cheesy, Sheridan’s latest modern-day Western confirms that, when he quits with the red-state vs. blue-state preaching and sticks to hard-bitten basics, he still knows how to spin a Yellowstone yarn.
