Beth Dutton is back with her own Yellowstone sequel series.Emerson Miller/Paramount+/Supplied
Yellowstone’s Beth Dutton, the destructive and deeply loyal daughter of Montana rancher John Dutton, was one of the most talked about television characters of the past decade.
Some viewers loved to hate her – and others just plain hated on her.
“Is there a modern Western protagonist out there quite as controversial as Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton?” entertainment website Collider asked ahead of the hit show’s final batch of episodes in 2024.
Well, let a thousand fiery internet debates bloom anew: Beth Dutton is back on Paramount+ at the centre of her own Yellowstone sequel series.
Dutton Ranch, which premiered with two episodes on May 15, sees Beth and Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser), her loyal husband and occasional accomplice, relocate from Montana with their foster son after a fire destroys the small farm they moved to at the conclusion of Yellowstone.
The three start a new life managing a ranch in Texas – but don’t let early scenes of Beth showing compassion to an injured horse make you think the cowgirl’s softening after five seasons of blackmail, intimidation and violence that culminated in a killing straight out of a Greek tragedy.
“Oh, that would be boring,” says Reilly, the British actress who portrays Beth, in a video interview.
Beth may come into Dutton Ranch with a whole railway car full of emotional baggage – even before you consider all the bodies of enemies she and her family disposed at their euphemistic “train station” in Wyoming – but Reilly finds all the trauma Beth has endured (and inflicted) helpful rather than hindering for rebuilding the character.
“It’s a spoil of riches that I have all of that in my head,” she says.
There are new aspects of Beth to delve into now that her beloved father, who was played by Kevin Costner, is dead and avenged.
“There’s an internal landscape that is different for me, that was important for me to explore with the writers and with the audience this year,” Reilly says. “Who is she now, after the curse of Yellowstone has ended?”
For many viewers, Beth was defined by her father’s (admiring) description of her as “evil” in the first season of Yellowstone. She wasn’t much more flattering to herself. As she told one enemy: “You are the trailer park. I am the tornado.”
In a tribute to the only Dutton daughter, Megan Garber wrote in The Atlantic: “Beth takes the stereotype of the femme fatale and knocks it askew: Although the term suggests a woman who will kill, Beth is a woman who will hold the knife to your neck and, rather than making the slice, delight in reminding you how easily she could.”
But other critics were unconvinced by Beth’s character development – or lack thereof. Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan – who, unusually for TV, held the pen for nearly every episode of the series – is often critiqued for how he writes female characters on his shows, including his current biggest hit, Landman. “On the Dutton Ranch strong men are just strong men, but strong women are grizzled war-torn hellcats which . . . often reads as just ‘crazy’ rather than strong,” Kelly McClure wrote in Salon.
When asked what she thinks of this discussion, Reilly professes not to be aware of it. “It’s funny to me because I’ve never played a character so brilliantly written as Beth,” she says, after taking it in.
“I found her to be so full of conundrum and complexity, as far as she wasn’t one thing or the other; a deeply feminine woman who was completely devoted to serving her father like a warrior.”
As for the overall slight against Sheridan, she points to in-demand actresses, such as Helen Mirren, Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldaña who have acted in his shows.
Dutton Ranch adds another to that list: Annette Bening. The five-time Oscar nominee plays Beulah Jackson, matriarch of a rival ranch.
“He must be doing something right to get these female powerhouses of actresses to come in and want to play these characters,” Reilly says.
If Beth continues to stoke debate through Dutton Ranch, critics won’t be able to put all the blame on Sheridan, who is an executive producer of the show but not writing on it (same as with his other Yellowstone CBS spinoff, Marshals).
Instead, Chad Feehan is the credited creator and showrunner – and he ran a proper writer’s room, which means, for the first time, female screenwriters such as Hilary Bettis and Hayley Tibbenham got to pen dialogue for the chao-causing cowgirl.
Will viewers detect a change in the character? “Taylor was a specific voice,” Reilly says. “Beth was born out of his imagination, so anybody else writing her is going to feel different, whether it’s a man or a woman.”
She continued: “But I was so happy that there were going to be females in the room, because that’s really important in our show. Most of our heads of department in our show are female.”
Reilly is also an executive producer on Dutton Ranch – though she doesn’t have any extra light to shed on a late-April report in Deadline that Feehan was no longer with the show.
“Chad is a wonderful writer,” she says. “It’s so hard to make a TV show. It’s so hard to make something, you know, in a completely different way. And I’m just so grateful for everyone who was involved.”