I didn’t think that Yellowstone could ever recover from its fifth and final season. All credit due to Taylor Sheridan—the writer hit a niche in the prestige TV market like a bullseye when the Western drama first debuted in 2018. Yellowstone’s story about a family fighting to protect their Montana ranch sounds like a no-brainer in hindsight, even if HBO famously turned it down. But Sheridan didn’t just rejuvenate the Western by putting cowboys on screen and yelling “dance!” as he shot bullets at their feet. There was something honest about how easy he made it all look, and it hit home with a wide section of America with no connection to Succession’s cold board rooms or Euphoria’s California high school hedonism. Audiences ate it up.
Then, Rome collapsed. The beauty of Yellowstone’s rolling mountain ranges faded and the characters’ dedication to persevere against all odds suddenly wasn’t a quality shared by their off-screen counterparts. As the Duttons fought to protect the American dream, the evils of the modern world prevailed behind the scenes. A feud over contracts and film schedules led to a rushed and haphazardly written series finale. Even worse? Yellowstone’s sequel spinoff, Marshals, turned one of the show’s leading characters into another cog in cable’s boring churn of task force procedurals. But just as the fire appeared to dim on Yellowstone’s future forever, Dutton Ranch rolled out a story surprisingly worthy of carrying the torch.
How? Well, to put it simply: Dutton Ranch is Yellowstone season 6. It’s not, contractually. And Paramount certainly can’t say it is as long as the network hopes to keep it streaming on Paramount+ and not Peacock—where they sold the initial streaming rights to Yellowstone six years ago. But after just a few minutes into the first episode of Dutton Ranch, it’s clear that the latest spinoff series is just Yellowstone with a new name and two very familiar faces.
When we last saw Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) at the end of the Yellowstone series finale, the couple aimed to start a new life for themselves. Daddy John Dutton (Kevin Costner) was unceremoniously assassinated in his bathroom off screen, and Beth’s brother Kayce (Luke Grimes) sold the family ranch to the Reservation. So, with nothing left to tie them to Yellowstone, Beth and Rip move to Dillon, Montana, and pick up right where we left off—at peace.
Any Yellowstone fan can probably guess where the series heads next, because peace isn’t exactly something the Duttons are afforded for more than five minutes at a time. As their ancestor Elsa Dutton narrated (often) in 1923, “Violence has always haunted this family … and where it doesn't follow, we hunt it down. We seek it.” So, the couple’s peaceful night’s sleep out in the fields of Montana is interrupted by a sudden wildfire that destroys everything they’ve built. Whether it’s God punishing them for their sins, some sort of Dutton violence curse—as Elsa suggests—or just shit luck, it doesn’t matter. Beth and Rip are now forced to pick themselves up, move to Texas (where Sheridan lives, conveniently), and start again.
This time, the roles are flipped. The Duttons are the newcomers encroaching on another ranch that has prospered for generations. The Jackson family, which owns everything in Rio Paloma, Texas from their plantation-era mansion, is run by matriarch Beulah Jackson (Annette Bening). Viewers hoping to see Ed Harris in the villain role will be surprised to find Bening playing against type instead, but the Duttons’ cunning new foe can certainly handle the part.
She’s joined by her two sons, the strait-laced Joaquin (Juan Pablo Raba) and his fuck-up of a brother Rob-Will (Jai Courtney). The latter is a wild card of a man so rashly destructive and racist that the writers gave him two first names—and no character ever abbreviates it. Rob-Will is immediately a problem for the Duttons, as well as a problem for Courtney if he ever wants to escape drunk cowboy typecasting after this one. But a plot involving a murder occurs early enough in the series that figuring out what to do with dead bodies without the convenience of the Train Station is a decent way to raise the stakes right away.
For the most part, Dutton Ranch is the grand return of Yellowstone that Marshals isn’t. I’m remaining hopeful that I won’t open the closet to see that Paramount and Dutton Ranch’s creative team stuffed a mountain of mess inside just waiting to pour out. Perhaps showrunner Chad Feehan departing the series before it even aired is just a sign that Sheridan actually wanted his hands on the wheel a bit more than he originally planned. Dutton Ranch has more of a traditional writers’ room, and I’m a bit worried what we might lose without Sheridan running the rodeo.
But at the same time, you can’t say that his one-man show is always right on the money. From what I’ve seen of Dutton Ranch so far, it seems like the Sheridan magic has rubbed off on them anyway.
In a scene near the end of Dutton Ranch’s premiere episode, Beth returns to their cozy cabin following her first spat with Bening. When she tells her husband that they have to get creative about finding a place to turn their cattle into prime angus beef, Rip takes a long sip of his Coors lager and delivers a line that’s certain to kill with fans: “Glad you’re making friends, honey.” Alongside the badassery, cattle-wrangling B-roll, and side plots about the dangers of snakes on the ranch, it’s just one important ingredient that makes Dutton Ranch finally feel like home again.
By Josh Rosenberg
