Dutton Ranch Series-Premiere Recap: That’s Right, You’re Not From Texas

Dutton Ranch
The Untold Want / Earn Another Day
Season 1 Episodes 1 - 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★

Of all the Yellowstone spinoffs, Dutton Ranch feels like the most can’t-miss — and maybe also the most ill-advised. The relationship between the ballsy lawyer Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and her family’s stoic, loyal, longtime ranch hand Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) always ran deeper than Yellowstone’s usual pulpy mush. But these two characters have been at the center of some of the franchise’s most ludicrous moments. Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan conceived both Beth and Rip as uncompromising badasses who can blow stories up by saying or doing what others won’t. Can you build a whole show around that?

Judging by Dutton Ranch’s first two episodes… maybe?

Right from the start, there are two big surprises with Dutton Ranch. The first is that, for now at least, this is a fairly low-key and easy-to-watch western drama, largely devoid of the culture war button-pushing that makes Sheridan shows like Landman and The Madison so maddening. (This calm may not last, for reasons I’ll get into later.)

The second surprise is that Dutton Ranch mostly leaves Yellowstone behind in its first 10 minutes. If you stopped paying attention to Yellowstone during its messy fifth and final season — and who could blame you? — the major development you missed is that after John Dutton’s death, his children gave up the family land to dodge inheritance taxes. Rip and Beth moved to a smaller ranch with their adopted teenage son, Carter (Finn Little).

Well, in Dutton Ranch’s opening scene, Beth and Rip lose all their new Montana property in a wildfire. The episode then jumps ahead six months to find the family resettled on yet another modest ranch in Ria Paloma, Texas. In a flashback at the start of episode two, we learn they drained their savings to buy 175 head of Black Angus cattle and 5,000 acres from the Edwardses, a nice family leaving the ranching business after the death of their patriarch.

This may seem like a relatively minor twist, swapping out Montana for Texas. But it actually makes a huge difference. One of the most consistently infuriating elements of Yellowstone was how Sheridan kept positioning the Duttons — a family of land barons with immense political power and a penchant for murder — as righteous underdogs. In Dutton Ranch, Beth and Rip are (finally!) genuine upstarts, building a business in a place where no one knows them well enough to fall into line.

Anyway, as it turns out, Ria Paloma has its own version of the Duttons. Annette Bening plays Beulah Jackson, the imperious matriarch of the massive 10-Petal Ranch. While Beulah rides around her property issuing snippy complaints to her underlings, the ranch’s ground-level operations are managed by her two very different sons: the curt number-cruncher Joaquin (Juan Pablo Raba) and the violent, impulsive, and frequently intoxicated Rob-Will (Jai Courtney). Like the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch, the 10-P employs some sketchy folks, willing to break the law to protect their brand. They’re also straight-up bullies, who rarely have their will challenged. 

The one exception? When Beulah tried to buy the Edwards Ranch, the Edwards family wouldn’t sell, because they loathed the Jacksons. She already has reason to despise the new ranch’s owners before Beth charges into the 10-P offices to book some time at the only slaughterhouse in Ria Paloma — owned by Beulah. 

That first Beth/Beulah faceoff is an episode one highlight. Beth has spent most of her adult life crushing her worst enemies and roughing up people she merely dislikes, just to be cussed. She’s at a low boil at this point in Dutton Ranch, but does start steaming up when Beulah tells her the slaughterhouse only takes big jobs, not the six measly steer that the Dutton Ranch needs processed — but will do the work for a cut of the profits. It’s fun to see Reilly coldly staring down a legend like Bening in round one of what’s sure to be an epic bout. (Beth refuses the terms and tells Rip they have to find another slaughterhouse. “Glad you’re making friends, honey,” he replies.)

Much of these first two episodes is devoted to setting up the Jacksons as the show’s antagonists — sometimes unexpectedly. Take Carter’s storyline. In episode one, he gets suckered by a pretty girl at his new high school, who asks him to go to the rodeo but really only wants him to buy beer for her friends. (The 19-year-old Carter looks 25.) While nursing his heartbreak in the parking lot, he meets the feisty, alluring Oreana (Natalie Alyn Lind) while saving her from being manhandled by a cocky steer-wrestler named Hoyt (Kyle Dondlinger). What Carter doesn’t know — and what we don’t find out until the end of episode two — is that Oreana is Beulah’s granddaughter, and the daughter of Rob-Will. 

As for Rob-Will, we discover early in episode one that he’s an evil son of a bitch. He and his right-hand man, Chet (Hart Denton), take a troublesome cowboy named Wes (Nakoa DeCoite) into the middle of nowhere and murder him, because he asked too many questions about the 10-P’s questionable accounting practices. Beaulah orders Joaquin to clean up the mess, which involves dragging his brother to rehab and possibly intimidating Wes’s highly suspicious widow, Whitney (Olivia Rose Keegan), into leaving town. 

All of this is very Yellowstone: the hair-trigger violence, the sloppy cover-ups that make everything worse, the intra-family feuds, things of that nature. This is the crude Sheridan plot machine in action. Corpses equal drama. Full stop. But Dutton Ranch’s crime components feel half-hearted at first. Not much about the Jacksons’ operation has been explained, and their villainy is a bit “plug and play” — not that original or exciting.

It’s far more enjoyable to follow Beth and Rip as they get their ranch going. There’s always been a competence porn element to watching Rip work. In these first two episodes, we’re introduced to Azul (J. R. Villarreal), the friendly Mexican-American hand the Dutton Ranch inherited from the Edwardses, and the born-again ex-con Zachariah (Marc Menchaca), who was best friends with Azul’s late father. Rip’s interactions with these two reinforce what a solid dude he is. Rip only values people who work hard, follow orders, and are good at “cowboying.” Their past is irrelevant. How are they now?

As for Beth, she takes it upon herself to straighten out the slaughterhouse situation by taking guidance from a new friend: the local large animal vet Everett McKinney, played by the great Ed Harris. After Everett saves the life of a horse Beth found impaled on the side of the road, he figures the best way to get his bill paid is to help Beth get her steers slaughtered. He makes an introduction for her at a small but reliable San Antonio company, whose proprietor understands exactly what she needs and appreciates her directness. More competence porn! I love it. 

Harris is the early MVP of this show. He’s so instantly likeable, with the way he protects his favorite bartender, Carol (played by the country singer Morgan Wade), when she’s being hassled by the seemingly omnipresent and always obnoxious Hoyt. He also brings gummy worms to the slaughterhouse to give to the proprietor’s son, and he sings along with Dwight Yoakam songs on the radio. He’s a decorated Naval helicopter pilot, for mercy’s sake! (A vet who’s a vet!) 

To be fair, these parts of Dutton Ranch — the celebration of honest, endearing everyday folks who know how to do their goddamn jobs — are also present in Yellowstone and other Sheridan series. It’s frequently what these shows do best: scenes of good people being soulful and funny while getting shit done.

This does, though, raise the big question hanging over Dutton Ranch: How much of what is enjoyable about its first two episodes is attributable to Sheridan, and how long can we expect those okay vibes to last? The credited showrunner is Chad Feehan, who also ran Sheridan’s not-bad (albeit short-lived) Lawman: Bass Reeves. After the completion of season one, Feehan “departed,” reportedly because Sheridan and producer David Glasser — and possibly Reilly and Hauser — were unhappy with his work.

This could just be a temperament clash. But Sheridan does have a history of replacing showrunners because they weren’t making his projects Sheridan-y enough. That’s something to keep an eye on as the season progresses. Because at the moment, we’re looking at a show with a promise of becoming a decent weekly hang-out, competing with an ambition — or perhaps a mandate — to be grittier.

Both of these first two episodes end on those gritty notes. In the premiere, Rip finds Wes’s hastily buried body being gnawed at by feral hogs. In the final scenes of the following episode, we learn that Rip dug up the body and hid it in his freezer before dumping it in the dark of night in a hazardous pit. As far as we know, Rip doesn’t know who Wes is, so it’s hard to say why he’s dropping his corpse down a hole. (Force of habit?)

But the best parts of these first two Dutton Ranches are quieter and sweeter. It’s Beth explaining to Carter why a good cowboy might need to learn algebra, or Rip hearing an exhausted Beth grumble, “What a fuckin’ day,” and gently reminding her, “They all are.” Can a Yellowstone spinoff that’s more about those calm, chill moments find an audience? More importantly, would its big boss want it to?

The Last Round Up

• Whatever else you want to say about the Yellowstone-verse, these shows are always visually stunning. Kudos to Christina Alexandra Voros, the director and cinematographer.

• I’m getting a lot of Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley vibes from Bening’s Beulah, and I am — as the kids say — here for it. The pride! The vanity! The damaged children and grandchildren! She should be a formidable foe for Reilly’s Beth.

• There are lots of scenes of Rip being a Good Man in these episodes, including him standing up for Azul when Rob-Will tosses out a racial slur, and him snapping at a cattle deliveryman who tries to use a prod on Rip’s steer. Is Rip… woke? 

• In the weeks ahead, I intend to dig deeper into what this show gains and loses from being set in Texas. For now, I just have to say I laughed out loud at Ria Paloma’s Sheriff Handy Wade (Josh Stewart) gruffly telling Carter, “This ain’t Montana” after arresting him for punching Hoyt. Yup, here in salty south Texas, we don’t cotton to the uppity ways of… Montanans?