Dutton Ranch

So before we get into the season itself, I have a confession to make, and long-time listeners might already know this about me. I was late to Yellowstone. Not fashionably late either. Embarrassingly late. The show kicked off back in 2018, ran for five seasons, became one of the biggest things on television, and I only actually sat down and watched it for the first time in 2025, after one of my friends had been nagging me about it for years. And the reason I held out for so long is simple. I’ve never been big into the cowboy genre. Westerns, ranches, cattle, big hats, none of it has ever been my natural home as a viewer. But I have to admit, once I finally gave in, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was very very good, and it made me understand why the whole Taylor Sheridan universe has become the juggernaut that it is.

So when Dutton Ranch was announced as the direct continuation of that story, I came into it from a slightly unusual position. I wasn’t someone who’d been waiting years between seasons. Yellowstone was still fresh for me. And honestly, that made me more nervous, not less. But we’ll get to that.

First, some quick context for anyone who hasn’t been following along. Dutton Ranch is a Paramount Plus series that picks up after the end of Yellowstone, following Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler, played once again by Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser, as they leave Montana behind and try to build a brand new life and a brand new cattle operation in South Texas. They bring their young ward Carter with them, played by Finn Little, and they land in a town called Rio Paloma, where they buy an old property and hang a new sign on the gate. The Dutton Ranch.

Of course, this being the Sheridan universe, the fresh start lasts about five minutes. Their arrival puts them straight into the path of the Jackson family, a wealthy, ruthless ranching dynasty that runs the Ten Petal Ranch and, for all practical purposes, runs the town. At the head of that family is Beulah Jackson, played by Annette Bening, and we will absolutely be talking about her, because she is one of the best things this show has going for it.

The season is nine episodes, it rolled out weekly through the middle of the year, and the finale has just landed, which means you can now sit down with the whole thing in one go. It also became the biggest original series launch in Paramount Plus history, so it’s fair to say the appetite for this world hasn’t gone anywhere. One little piece of production trivia worth knowing, though. Chad Feehan, who created the show and ran this first season, actually departed before the series even premiered, and season two, which has already been confirmed, will be run by someone new. Make of that what you will, but whatever was happening behind the curtain, it didn’t stop this first season from landing.

A Fresh Start That Lasts Five Minutes

Now, my first impressions, and this is where things got interesting for me straight away. If you watched the final episode of Yellowstone, you’ll remember we actually got a glimpse of what this new chapter was going to look like. Beth and Rip ended up on their new property, and it looked amazing. That image was the promise of this show. So imagine my surprise when Dutton Ranch opens, shows us that very ranch, and then promptly burns it down, flips it, and moves the entire family to a completely different location.

I’ll be honest, that threw me. There was a gap of getting on towards two years between the end of Yellowstone and this premiere, and watching that opening, I found myself wondering whether something wasn’t quite singing behind the scenes, and whether they went back and reworked the whole concept during that time. Now, to be fair to the show, Reilly and Hauser have talked openly about wanting to tear up that ending on purpose, to give Beth and Rip a proper clean slate rather than just carrying the old show’s furniture into a new house. So maybe it was always the plan, or maybe the plan changed and they’ve made peace with it. Either way, the effect on screen is the same. This isn’t Yellowstone with the serial numbers filed off. Well. Not entirely. And that brings me to the thing I was most worried about.

The Beth Dutton Problem

Beth Dutton.

Now let me explain, because I know how that sounds. Beth in Yellowstone was a great character. Kelly Reilly is a phenomenal actress and she made Beth one of the most memorable people on television: vicious, brilliant, unpredictable, and absolutely exhausting. And I mean that as a compliment. But here’s my honest truth. Beth was a character I personally only ever enjoyed in small doses. That was the secret weapon of Yellowstone’s structure. You never spent a full episode or long uninterrupted spells with any one character, and for someone as full on as Beth, that was perfect. You’d get her storming through a scene, torching everything in her path, and then the show would cut away and let you breathe.

The same goes for Rip, honestly, although in a different way. I loved Rip and his hard arse manner. He’s a man of few words who solves problems in ways you probably shouldn’t ask too many questions about, and Cole Hauser has always played him beautifully. But he was also a small-dose character, a presence rather than a focus.

So going into Dutton Ranch, my big fear was obvious. This entire show is Beth, Rip and Carter. There’s no John Dutton to anchor things, no Kayce, no Jamie, no sprawling ensemble to cut away to. What happens when the two characters I loved in small doses suddenly become the whole meal? Was I about to sit through 45 minutes an episode of Beth screaming her head off, getting into fights and draining a bottle of vodka, week after week?

And this is where the show pleasantly surprised me, more than anything else in the entire season. They mellowed her. Not defanged her. Mellowed her. Beth in Dutton Ranch is still fierce, still calculating, still the smartest and most dangerous person in almost every room she walks into. Her financial brain is front and centre, especially as she sets about building a slaughterhouse operation and chasing meat distribution deals to anchor their new empire. But the volume has come down. The constant scorched-earth rage that defined her in Montana has been reshaped into something colder, steadier and, for my money, far more watchable across a full season. I’d bet good money the writers sat down and had exactly the conversation I was having with myself. You cannot build a whole show on Yellowstone Beth. So they built it on this Beth instead. And the result is that I enjoyed Beth more in Dutton Ranch than I have ever enjoyed her before. She was great in Yellowstone, but I’m glad we only got her in small doses there, and I’m even more glad the version we get here is one I could happily spend nine hours with.

Rip, meanwhile, does exactly what Rip does. He steadies the ship. He’s fighting to get a 7,000-acre property under control in unfamiliar country, dealing with new land, new problems and new enemies, all while keeping the darker chapters of his and Beth’s past buried where they belong. Hauser plays it with that same quiet menace and surprising warmth, and the marriage between these two is really the heart of the whole season. After everything they went through in Montana, watching them actually fight for a life together, rather than just fighting everyone around them, gives the show an emotional spine Yellowstone only occasionally reached for.

And then there’s Carter. Finn Little has quietly grown up in this role, and the show leans into it. Carter is stumbling towards manhood in a place where he knows nobody, trying to work out who he is when he’s not just the kid Beth and Rip took in. And in classic fashion, he complicates everything by falling for Oreana Jackson, the granddaughter of the family that wants the Duttons gone. It’s a storyline that could have felt like a soap opera bolt-on, but it works, because it forces Beth and Rip into the one role neither of them ever expected. Parents. Watching two of the hardest people in this universe try to guide a young man into adulthood, while a rival dynasty circles the property, is quietly one of the most rewarding threads of the season.

Speaking of that rival dynasty. Annette Bening as Beulah Jackson is inspired casting. She rules Rio Paloma like a woman who has never once been told no, all iron poise and designer polish wrapped around something absolutely ruthless, and she treats the Duttons’ arrival like an infection her town needs to be cured of. Every scene she shares with Kelly Reilly crackles, because for the first time in this universe, Beth is up against someone who plays her own game at her own level. And on the other side of the Jackson family you’ve got Jai Courtney as Rob-Will, Beulah’s volatile youngest son, a walking lit match whose recklessness keeps threatening to turn a cold war between the two ranches into a very hot one.

The Season That Flips the Chessboard

Now, the season itself. The first stretch of episodes, I’ll be honest, plays things fairly familiar. There’s friction over land and water. Rip finds a body on the property. Beth goes head to head with Beulah at a cattle auction. It’s confident, it’s handsome, it’s well made, but it does feel, in those early hours, like the show is running the old playbook in a new state. Two families, one town, everyone armed. If you’d told me at episode three that this was just going to be more of the same, I’d have believed you, and honestly, part of me would have been fine with that, because the same was very very good.

But then the season does something properly clever, and this is the choice that won me over completely. On top of the Jackson feud, the Duttons get hit by something no amount of intimidation or firepower can fix. A devastating outbreak of foot and mouth disease sweeps through the region and threatens to wipe out their livestock entirely, and with it, their whole financial future. The trauma of everything Beth, Rip and even Carter went through in those early episodes lays the family low, and the show makes a decision I did not see coming.

At the midway point of the season, and I won’t go too deep into the details because it’s much better discovered on screen, the entire chessboard gets flipped. Rather than digging in for another five years of ranch-versus-ranch warfare, the story manoeuvres Beth and Rip into Beulah Jackson’s orbit in a way that completely changes what this show is. They’re no longer just defending their own patch of dirt against an enemy. Suddenly their skills, everything they learned keeping the Yellowstone alive for all those years, become assets in someone else’s empire, and the whole dynamic between these two families turns on its head.

Also, and I’ll keep this vague, the reveal late in the season about what’s really been happening in Rio Paloma, and what it means for the disease outbreak, hands Beth exactly the kind of ammunition she was born to use. The table is set for season two in a way that has me properly excited, and given the show has already been renewed, we know that table is going to get used.

If I’m nitpicking, and it’s my job to nitpick, I’d say the early episodes lean a little hard on familiarity before the show reveals its actual hand, and if you bounced off Yellowstone’s rhythms, those first few hours won’t change your mind. There are also moments where the Texas setting still feels like it’s being introduced to us rather than lived in. Understandable for a first season, but I’m hoping year two lets Rio Paloma breathe the way Montana eventually did. Small stuff, honestly, in a season that gets the big decisions right.

But look, that’s just how this season landed for me, a bloke who spent years dodging Yellowstone and then fell for it anyway. Entertainment is subjective. Maybe you loved full-throttle Yellowstone Beth and this steadier version feels like a step down, or maybe the Texas relocation just doesn’t grab you the way Montana did. What works for me may not work for you, and that’s completely okay. That’s the fun of it.