Dutton Ranch (2026) • Review • Yellowstone's Sequel Finds Its Own Voice

Created by Chad Feehan and starring Kelly Reilly, Cole Hauser and Annette Bening, Dutton Ranch is the 2026 Paramount+ series that continues the Yellowstone story, following Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler as they leave Montana behind to build a new cattle empire in South Texas — straight into the path of a ruthless rival ranching dynasty.

In this review, Fraser shares why he went into this one nervous about spending nine full episodes with a character he only ever enjoyed in small doses, how a midway-season turn completely changed what he thought this show was, and why Annette Bening's Beulah Jackson might be the best new addition to this entire universe.

🎬 COMING UP NEXT

Next Review: CONTACT

Fraser takes on Contact, the 1997 sci-fi drama starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. A SETI scientist finally gets proof of extraterrestrial life when a signal from deep space arrives carrying blueprints for a mysterious machine, one built to send a single passenger across the galaxy. Is this still the smartest movie ever made about first contact? And can a story built on the clash between faith and science hold up decades later?

Thanks for listening to Frame 70 Reviews. New reviews every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, along with classics revisited in From the Vault. Every review in full at frame70.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm Fraser, your host, and today we're taking a look at Dutton Ranch, the 2026 series created by Chad Fehan and starring Kelly Riley, Cole Hauser, and Annette Benning. And as always, we're answering one simple question. Is it worth your time? Let's get into it. So before we get into the season itself, I have a confession to make, and longtime 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 Riley 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 Beula Jackson, played by Annette Benning, 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. Now, my first impressions, and this is where things got interesting for me straight away. If you watch 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, Riley 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. Beth Dutton. Now let me explain, because I know how that sounds. Beth in Yellowstone was a great character. Kelly Riley 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-ass 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 case, 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 center, 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 Oriana 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 Benning 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 Dutton's arrival like an infection her town needs to be cured of. Every scene she shares with Kelly Riley 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, Beuller's volatile younger son, a walking lit match whose recklessness keeps threatening to turn a cold war between the two ranches into a very hot one. 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 maneuvers 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. And that for me is the frame 70 moment of this season. Not a shootout, not a death, not an explosion. It's that midway stretch where the show effectively looks the audience in the eye and says, You thought you knew what this was, and you were wrong. Because I did think I knew what it was. I'd half settled into the idea that Dutton Ranch was going to be Yellowstone's sixth season wearing a Texas hat. And instead, the show used everything I assumed about it as a setup, then pulled the rug. It kept the Neo-Western DNA, the cattle, the intimidation, the boardroom knife fighting, but it pointed all of it in a direction the original show never went. That pivot is the reason this series feels fresh rather than reheated, and it's the thing I kept turning over in my head after the finale. 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. The frame 70 verdict for Dutton Ranch Season 1. Worth your time, and comfortably so. This is nine episodes on Paramount Plus, all available right now, and it's the rare sequel series that respects what came before while having the nerve to become its own thing. Kelly Riley gives us the most watchable version of Beth Dutton yet. Annette Benning is a magnificent new adversary, and that midway turn transforms a good continuation into a properly interesting new show. If you loved Yellowstone, this is an easy recommendation. And if like me you were never a cowboy genre person to begin with, this might just be the version of this world that wins you over. 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.