Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 6.8% (91 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0.4% (5 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 8.9% (119 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 9.5% (126 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 6.5% (86 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 3.5% (47 hits)
• Framing Effect - 3.8% (50 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 4.4% (58 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 2% (26 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 1.6% (21 hits)

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Dutton Ranch Is the True Successor to Yellowstone.

But There’s One Key Difference.

This piece contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Dutton Ranch.

One of those odd overlaps between television and real life unfolded in late May, when an episode of the Yellowstone spinoff Dutton Ranch had Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) discovering that a new bull he’d purchased for his South Texas ranch had infected his herd with foot-and-mouth disease—a virus affecting livestock that, unlike the similarly named but unrelated sickness that still plagues our schools and daycares, was eradicated in the United States in 1929.

This occurred on TV just a week before the announcement that, back in the real world, the flesh-eating screwworm had returned to South Texas.

Rip, unlike the real-life ranchers who found signs of screwworm in their livestock, chooses not to report the problem, in order to save his ranch’s reputation, and instead enlists his two cowboys and his wife, the indomitable Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly), to usher the herd into a hole in the ground, where he personally shoots them one by one.

“You don’t deserve this,” he says, then shoots the single calf he and Beth had saved from their ranch in Montana, which they lost in a forest fire.

Yes, Beth and Rip are facing hard times, and unlike the Duttons’ rich-people problems on Yellowstone, their issues finally feel real.

At the end of Yellowstone OG, after patriarch John Dutton (Kevin Costner) dies and Beth and her brother Kayce (Luke Grimes) sell the ranch to the local tribe for a dollar an acre, the remaining Dutton siblings move on to the next phases of their lives.

They’re doing so this time without the firm hand of Taylor Sheridan, who is merely executive producer of Dutton Ranch and Kayce’s CBS-procedural spin-off Marshals, not showrunner or writer.

The first season of Dutton Ranch wraps up Friday on Paramount+, after proving that sometimes, it’s good for beloved characters to move out of Dad’s basement and see the world, foot-and-mouth and all.

Although Yellowstone has birthed two post-series spinoffs, it’s Dutton Ranch that’s positioned as the true inheritor of the original show’s spirit.

But this sequel asks something completely new of these characters: to be adults, with normal adult problems.

After the smaller property they bought in Montana following the sale of the Yellowstone ranch burns up in that Episode 1 wildfire, the couple uses what Rip calls “every penny” of their money to buy a family ranch in South Texas, in a fictional small town called Rio Paloma.

They bring along their adopted son, Carter (Finn Little), who they force to attend high school, even though he’s 19 and nobody there is nice about it.

Carter pouts and sulks through most of this season, behavior that seems to annoy some fans—shouldn’t he be grateful?—but adds some very realistic parenting challenges to the growing list of Beth and Rip’s issues.

The local equivalent of the Yellowstone is the 10 Petal, the biggest ranch in the area, which is run by Beulah Jackson (Annette Bening), who, along with Ed Harris (who plays the local large-animal veterinarian), is the token aging lion in this production.

(Every Sheridan-adjacent show needs one or two: Costner, Pfeiffer and Russell, Ford, Thornton and Moore.)

The showrunner of Dutton Ranch’s first season, Chad Feehan (who also created the Sheridan-produced Lawmen: Bass Reeves), seeds Yellowstone echoes across this new show.

Beulah has an adopted son, Joaquin (Juan Pablo Raba), whose loyalties are uncertain, just like those of the Dutton siblings’ adopted brother, Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley).

Beulah, like John Dutton, is in a constant state of stress trying to keep the 10 Petal from being broken up and sold.

The cowboys in the 10 Petal bunkhouse fight among themselves; people who cross the Jacksons get killed, and bodies get dumped in remote places.

Visually, Dutton Ranch is browner and subtler than Yellowstone, looking way more Texas than Montana.

But, as this first season goes on, you see that the biggest difference between the two series lies in Beth and Rip themselves.

These two are torn from their birthright and trying to start something new.

Beth and Rip were fan favorites on Yellowstone—the couple that launched a million ships.

Besides some periods of employment in the financial sector, Beth devotes most of her life to being her father’s fiercest soldier, loyal, caustic, and smart as a whip.

(Taylor Sheridan loves to write a scene where a beautiful woman enters a conference room and makes strong men want to quit their jobs.

Landman viewers who didn’t see Yellowstone may or may not recognize that the sharkish lawyer Rebecca, played by Kayla Wallace, is just Beth Dutton lite.)

Kelly Reilly plays Beth with a bitter undertone—she’s a person who rarely smiles, and never laughs.

As a child, Beth caused her mother’s death through no real fault of her own; then, when she was a teenager, Jamie took her to the adjoining reservation to help her get an abortion, and, hearing that the procedure would be accompanied by sterilization, let the surgery go ahead without her knowledge.

(No, this doesn’t make sense, but it’s Yellowstone; we roll with it.)

The proposal is another moment that makes Beth-and-Rip an interesting creation, a couple prone to inversions of gender roles that are all the more notable given Rip’s masculine hypercompetence as a cowboy on the ranch.

(Notably, the spinoff is called “Dutton” Ranch, not “Wheeler” Ranch; Beth kept her name.)

And, despite all the hair-trigger violence and seething speeches about city folk that make Beth and Rip classic Taylor Sheridan creations, in the original show they were almost unpersons, so completely loyal to John Dutton that they were frozen, infantilized and unable to make their own choices.

They weren’t in charge, and they weren’t seriously at risk—no matter how often Kevin Costner looked worried and mused about the possibility of losing the family ranch, the Duttons were like barons in their corner of Montana, celebrities who always seemed to be one phone call (or one secret murder) away from fixing a problem.

When John Dutton died, he was the governor of the state—what was the worst that could happen?

In Rio Paloma, though, we’ve gotten to see Beth and Rip find their own way and make their own allies: McKinney, the vet played by Ed Harris, who befriends Beth; Azul (J.

R.

Villarreal) and Zachariah (Marc Menchaca), the two cowboys Rip hires to work on the Dutton Ranch.

For a while, after the death of their herd puts the couple in need of employment, it seems like Rip and Beth will fall in with the Jackson family.

Beulah takes Beth on as a sort of business consultant, and hires Rip as foreman.

But in the last two episodes of the season, some of the shady things we’ve seen happen on the 10 Petal are finally explained: It turns out that Beulah’s been smuggling in drugs from Mexico, receiving cows who’ve had holes cut in them and packs of fentanyl inserted, and that’s the way she’s kept the ranch afloat.

She may have things in common with Yellowstone’s patriarch, but she’s no John Dutton, whose crimes were always for the best.

There’s some danger in this shocking reveal, for a show that’s otherwise promising: Bening is great, and I liked seeing her take on the role of surrogate matriarch, an avenue that seems foreclosed now that we know she did something so un-Dutton-ish.

And Beulah’s troubled son, Rob-Will (Jai Courtney)—this bizarre name is pronounced with the emphasis on “Will”—dies in the newly aired season finale, with his character still very much underdeveloped.

But, small storytelling bumps aside, seeing Beth and Rip scrabble to build a new ranch, even if that scrabbling involves the sad scene of the death of a herd, is way more fun than watching them serve another baby boomer holding onto an overinflated “legacy.”

Hopefully Benjamin Cavell, Dutton Ranch’s new showrunner for Season 2, will feel the same.