Dutton Ranch Review: Beth and Rip Start a New Chapter, With Mixed Results

Dutton Ranch opens with disaster. No, we're not talking about showrunner Chad Feehan exiting the show before it even premiered, although that does seem messy. In the first few minutes of the first episode of the new Yellowstone spin-off, a natural disaster strikes, sending Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and Rip (Cole Hauser) searching for a new home. 

They find one in Texas, where Rip has a connection to someone selling a storied ranch that's fallen on hard times but still has a reputation for top-tier cows. Beth and Rip buy it as a new foothold for a new life and move in with their foster son, Carter (Finn Little). A new town means new friends — Beth earns the respect of a local veterinarian (Ed Harris), while Carter swoons for his new classmate Oreana (Natalie Alyn Lind) — but also new enemies. Beulah Jackson (Annette Bening) is the ranch matriarch around here, and she's quite suspicious of these newcomers muscling in on her territory. 

Beth and Rip were fan favorites on Yellowstone, thanks both to their star-crossed romance and soap opera shenanigans. As explained on that show, the two met when they were teenagers after the orphaned Rip was taken in by Beth's ranch owner father, John Dutton (Kevin Costner). Rip and Beth dated on and off for years, with the heroic ranch hand carrying a torch for his rich boss's daughter for his entire adult life but afraid to bridge the class divide, until they finally got married (in characteristically dramatic fashion, complete with a kidnapped priest) in the Season 4 finale. 

That backstory, and the additional five seasons' worth of plot they went through on Yellowstone, is almost never mentioned on Dutton Ranch, at least in the first four episodes given to critics ahead of the premiere. Reilly, Hauser, and Little are the only actors from the original show who have reprised their roles for the new series. This makes it a relatively easy jumping-on point for any new viewers interested in what the Yellowstone universe is all about, though it may take those viewers several episodes to see what makes Beth and Rip special. Longtime Yellowstone fans, who already have years' worth of emotional investment in these characters and their journeys, get to enjoy Dutton Ranch as a "happily ever after" continuation. Granted, there's still plenty of drama for them to deal with, but in the kill-or-be-killed world of Yellowstone, surviving and carrying on is a victory in itself. 

6.5

Dutton Ranch

at Paramount+

Like

• The scene-setting is immersive — complete with cinematic Texas landscapes
• It's fun to see a reversal of the previous Yellowstone dynamic: Now Beth and Rip are the intruders going up against an established ranch dynasty full of messy family dynamics
• Surprisingly sympathetic to animals' pain

Dislike

• There's a little too much going on so far and it's unclear how it all fits together
• Being unmoored from Yellowstone canon opens this show up to new viewers but also struggles to justify its importance

Ever since Costner parted ways with Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan in favor of his Horizon movie project, there's been a question of whether Sheridan's shows can capture the same cultural attention without the star. The final season of Yellowstone proper seemed to answer with a big goofy "no," earning derision from both fans and critics for the way it mostly transferred Costner's screentime to Sheridan himself, in a rare acting role. Dutton Ranch tries to provide a better answer by combining Yellowstone's best characters with new sources of movie-star charisma in the form of Bening and Harris. 

What's especially fun about Bening's performance, beyond getting to see her sit a horse like a boss or make cutthroat business decisions, is the way she's basically playing a mirror version of Costner's character. On Yellowstone, Beth and Rip were often in the position of protecting her family's land and her father's legacy from rapacious outsiders, ranging from her evil adopted brother to rival financiers, and a lot of the fun came from watching them employ dirty methods for noble goals. But everything's reversed on Dutton Ranch. 

Now, Beth and Rip are the newcomers trying to make a piece of South Texas their own, and Beulah fights back while trying to juggle her dynasty's complicated family dynamics. The old power struggle between Beth and her adopted brother Jamie Dutton is here replaced by resentment between Beulah's sons, the alcoholic wild man Rob-Will (Jai Courtney) and the straitlaced Joaquin (Juan Pablo Raba), who's often stuck picking up the pieces. It's a fun inversion of the familiar dynamic, with an interesting political undertone: Beulah and her clan basically have a monopoly on the area's cattle, one Beth and Rip seek to break. But aside from a dramatic burst of deadly violence in the first episode, the Jackson family's feuds are so far lacking in Dutton-worthy fireworks.

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Harris, meanwhile, plays a kindly old veterinarian named Everett McKinney, who first gets to know Beth when he's called to euthanize an injured horse that's blocking a road. But Beth empathizes with the horse, seeing it as a fellow free spirit with a one-in-a-million chance of making it through this crazy world, and convinces Everett to heal her instead. Everett is the primary vessel for one of the coolest elements of Dutton Ranch, its real heartfelt sympathy for animals. That may sound like a weird description of a show about, well, ranching, but the heroes make a point of standing for a more loving relationship to livestock. This injured horse is treated not as an inconvenience, but as a life worthy of saving. On the other end of the spectrum, there's a particularly horrifying scene in the fourth episode when sickness starts spreading among the Duttons' cattle and Rip is forced to gun dozens of them down to prevent it spreading further. The result looks and feels like a mass shooting, with the appropriate gravitas. 

But so far, Dutton Ranch's blend of new and old characters hasn't quite come together. While Beth and Rip are trying to start a new business and fighting off underhanded tactics from the likes of Beulah, Carter is experiencing normal high school things like finding a job and crushing on a girl, while Beulah herself is trying to untangle a murder mystery. Rapidly shifting tones like that can be fun when it works, but so far it feels like less than the sum of its parts. 

Premieres: Friday, May 15 on Paramount+ with two episodes, followed by a new episode each Friday. Also airs Fridays at 8/7c on Paramount Network
Who's in it: Kelly Reilly, Cole Hauser, Finn Little, Jai Courtney, Natalie Alyn Lind, Annette Bening, Ed Harris
Who's behind it: Chad Feehan, creator; Taylor Sheridan and John Linson, executive producers; Christina Alexandra Voros, Greg Yaitanes, Jessica Lowrey, and Phil Abraham, directors
For fans of: Yellowstone
How many episodes we watched: 4 of 9