The “Yellowstone” cinematic universe has now grown so large that remaining oblivious to the Dutton family officially feels like a dereliction of professional and patriotic duty.
Would you like a procedural crime show? That’s “Marshals,” which premiered in March, in which Kayce Dutton puts his Navy SEALs background to use catching bad guys. Perhaps you are more interested in period dramas, in which case you can watch Dutton ancestors played by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in “1883” or Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren in “1923.”
The original “Yellowstone,” which aired from 2018 to 2024, had Kevin Costner galloping all over Montana until he eventually became governor of the state and died, leaving his grown children to figure out what would become of his ranch, which in this fictional world, is the largest in the United States.
The land is the thing. For all the times people told me that I needed to watch “Yellowstone” because it was a sweeping family drama (“You don’t have to be interested in cowboys, you just have to be interested in people!”), when I spent this week watching more Yellowstones than I can strictly recommend, it became clear that these are actually all shows about the unfathomable bigness of 800,000 acres of dirt. How crazy it can make you. We’re in a real drink-your-milkshake situation, everybody hopped up on finite natural resources and Carhartt.
In the middle of one viewing session, a colleague messaged me that the actor and film critic Rex Reed had died. He was 87 so this was hardly unexpected; what my colleague wanted to show me was a sentence in his obituary explaining that at the time of Reed’s death he lived in the Dakota, a storied New York residential building, in a condo he’d purchased in 1970 for $30,000. With inflation, that’s the current equivalent to about $265,000. In actuality, even a two-bedroom apartment in the Dakota today will set you back $4 million to $5 million.
Manhattan, much like Montana, simply isn’t acquiring any more square footage. Housing costs will crush us all. Yellowstone provides us the pornography of space.
“Dutton Ranch,” the newest spinoff of the “Yellowstone” franchise, premieres Friday on Paramount+. As the opening credits roll, a fire rips across Dutton land in Montana. Daughter Beth (Kelly Reilly) and her husband, Rip (Cole Hauser), throw their possessions in the pickup and watch in the rearview as their lives go up in flames.
But when God closes a cowboy hat he opens a boot spur: Within a month these Duttons have started over with a new ranch in Texas where the family name means nothing (we’re in Annette Bening country, y’all) and Beth has to beg an abattoir to slaughter her few head of cattle.
Beth and Rip encounter shady criminals, secret pasts and vigilante justice. But mostly they encounter the vastness of land — “The sky doesn’t stop here,” Beth marvels in one scene — and the urgent sense, echoed in previous Yellowstones, that the land is all there is.
“What grass there is in the mountains is all we have here,” one character solemnly tells another in “1923,” as they debate whether cattle or sheep should have first priority to graze. In “1883″ the first generation of Duttons shove through the unsettled American West, crossing paths with European immigrants who had run out of room in the Old World. “Men cannot own wild land,” a character informs us in the series finale of the O.G. “Yellowstone,” but damned if seven generations of Duttons haven’t died trying.
And yes, they talk of stewardship as often ownership (Teddy Roosevelt gets product placement in “Dutton Ranch”) and about how tough it can be to eke out a living when you’re at the behest of Mother Nature. But on one “Yellowstone” subreddit that I stumbled on this week, a snarky fan pointed out that no matter how hard up the ranch gets, it’s “not enough to get rid of the private helicopter or personal chef.” Another commenter responded with the truly vicious, “It’s for people who live in the suburbs but think they’re country.”
The word that keeps coming to mind when I think about the “Yellowstone” franchise is “scarcity.” The Duttons have never seen such big land, but they have never been more afraid of losing it. There are only so many restaurants that need fancy beef, only so many prizewinning bulls that can be purchased at auction to stud. The world is enormous and endless, but if you are Beth and Rip, it still feels like everyone else is trying to pry it from your cold, calloused hands, like you must defend it with your life.
“Against your religion?” an expedition leader asks a group of German immigrants in “1883,” wanting to know why none of them have guns.
“Against our laws,” the man answers angrily as if he had been forbidden water or oxygen. “We were not allowed to have them.”
Buddy, I have great news for you about America.
And this, in the end, is what “Yellowstone” is about, or at least what it thinks it is about: a particular theory of America. How, since its birth, it has been populated by people who ran out of space wherever they once were, and so they moved to a country where they could get more, by force if necessary. How this is a good thing.
“Violence has always haunted this family,” the character Elsa Dutton says in one of the Yellowstones. “It followed us from the Scottish Highlands and the slums of Dublin. It ravaged us upon the coffin ships of Ireland. Stranded us on the beaches of New Jersey, devoured us upon the battlefields of Shiloh and Antietam. And it followed us here, lurking beneath the pines and in the rivers. And where it doesn’t follow, we hunt it down. We seek it.”
It’s all depressing as hell, but I’ll admit it’s good television. The cowboys in their Stetsons, dealing dirty and riding rough, over their acres and acres of land.
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