{"id":671786,"date":"2026-05-15T19:17:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T19:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/671786\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T19:17:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T19:17:08","slug":"yellowstones-evil-beth-dutton-is-back-with-the-sequel-dutton-ranch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/671786\/","title":{"rendered":"Yellowstone\u2019s \u2018evil\u2019 Beth Dutton is back with the sequel Dutton Ranch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Beth Dutton is back with her own Yellowstone sequel series.Emerson Miller\/Paramount+\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Yellowstone\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Some viewers loved to hate her \u2013 and others just plain hated on her.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs there a modern Western protagonist out there quite as controversial as Kelly Reilly\u2019s Beth Dutton?\u201d entertainment website Collider asked ahead of the hit show\u2019s final batch of episodes in 2024.<\/p>\n

Well, let a thousand fiery internet debates bloom anew: Beth Dutton is back on Paramount+ at the centre of her own Yellowstone sequel series.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The three start a new life managing a ranch in Texas \u2013 but don\u2019t let early scenes of Beth showing compassion to an injured horse make you think the cowgirl\u2019s softening after five seasons of blackmail, intimidation and violence that culminated in a killing straight out of a Greek tragedy.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, that would be boring,\u201d says Reilly, the British actress who portrays Beth, in a video interview.<\/p>\n

Beth may come into Dutton Ranch with a whole railway car full of emotional baggage \u2013 even before you consider all the bodies of enemies she and her family disposed at their euphemistic \u201ctrain station\u201d in Wyoming \u2013 but Reilly finds all the trauma Beth has endured (and inflicted) helpful rather than hindering for rebuilding the character. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a spoil of riches that I have all of that in my head,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n

There are new aspects of Beth to delve into now that her beloved father, who was played by Kevin Costner, is dead and avenged.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an internal landscape that is different for me, that was important for me to explore with the writers and with the audience this year,\u201d Reilly says. \u201cWho is she now, after the curse of Yellowstone has ended?\u201d<\/p>\n

For many viewers, Beth was defined by her father\u2019s (admiring) description of her as \u201cevil\u201d in the first season of Yellowstone. She wasn\u2019t much more flattering to herself. As she told one enemy: \u201cYou are the trailer park. I am the tornado.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a tribute to the only Dutton daughter, Megan Garber wrote in The Atlantic: \u201cBeth 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

But other critics were unconvinced by Beth\u2019s character development \u2013 or lack thereof. Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan \u2013 who, unusually for TV, held the pen for nearly every episode of the series \u2013 is often critiqued for how he writes female characters on his shows, including his current biggest hit, Landman. \u201cOn the Dutton Ranch strong men are just strong men, but strong women are grizzled war-torn hellcats which . . . often reads as just \u2018crazy\u2019 rather than strong,\u201d Kelly McClure wrote in Salon.<\/p>\n

When asked what she thinks of this discussion, Reilly professes not to be aware of it. \u201cIt\u2019s funny to me because I\u2019ve never played a character so brilliantly written as Beth,\u201d she says, after taking it in.<\/p>\n

\u201cI found her to be so full of conundrum and complexity, as far as she wasn\u2019t one thing or the other; a deeply feminine woman who was completely devoted to serving her father like a warrior.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the overall slight against Sheridan, she points to in-demand actresses, such as Helen Mirren, Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman and Zoe Salda\u00f1a who have acted in his shows.<\/p>\n

Dutton Ranch adds another to that list: Annette Bening. The five-time Oscar nominee plays Beulah Jackson, matriarch of a rival ranch.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe must be doing something right to get these female powerhouses of actresses to come in and want to play these characters,\u201d Reilly says.<\/p>\n

If Beth continues to stoke debate through Dutton Ranch, critics won\u2019t 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).<\/p>\n

Instead, Chad Feehan is the credited creator and showrunner \u2013 and he ran a proper writer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Will viewers detect a change in the character? \u201cTaylor was a specific voice,\u201d Reilly says. \u201cBeth was born out of his imagination, so anybody else writing her is going to feel different, whether it\u2019s a man or a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

She continued: \u201cBut I was so happy that there were going to be females in the room, because that\u2019s really important in our show. Most of our heads of department in our show are female.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reilly is also an executive producer on Dutton Ranch \u2013 though she doesn\u2019t have any extra light to shed on a late-April report in Deadline that Feehan was no longer with the show. <\/p>\n

\u201cChad is a wonderful writer,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s so hard to make a TV show. It\u2019s so hard to make something, you know, in a completely different way. And I\u2019m just so grateful for everyone who was involved.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Beth Dutton is back with her own Yellowstone sequel series.Emerson Miller\/Paramount+\/Supplied Yellowstone\u2019s Beth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75,2922],"class_list":["post-671786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-noastack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}