Minor spoilers for the first two episodes of Dutton Ranch are ahead! You can stream them with a Paramount+ subscription and catch new episodes every Friday.
Once Beth and Rip met the Jackson family in Dutton Ranch, I quickly realized that they were very easy to compare to the Dutton family. Led by Annette Bening’s Beulah Jackson, this powerful family of ranchers seems to be the antagonists of this series. However, I also couldn’t help but see the parallels between the Jackson matriarch and the patriarch of Yellowstone, John Dutton. Although after chatting with Annette Bening and Natalie Alyn Lind about this new family, I realized there’s another character we need to compare Beulah to.
As I watched the first few episodes of Dutton Ranch, I couldn’t help but draw connections between Beulah and John Dutton. Like Kevin Costner’s character, Beulah is managing a massive ranch that her kids are major power players in. Like John Dutton, she’s trying really hard to keep her family’s legacy alive. And like John Dutton, she’s an absolute boss. So, before the show premiered on the 2026 TV schedule, I asked Annette Bening if that was a fair comparison to make. In response, she said:
Yeah, I think it is a fair comparison. Although for Beulah, of course, from her point of view, she’s just trying to keep everything from falling apart. Her ranch is really on borrowed time. Her son’s very ill, and she’s trying to keep it all together and trying to maintain this legacy that her father passed on to her. And she has a lot of complicated, you know, kind of feelings about that, and still is trying to please her father.
Now, it becomes clear across Yellowstone’s five seasons (which you can stream with a Peacock subscription) that John Dutton is doing the same thing. He was trying to keep his father’s dream alive and his family’s land intact. So, he led the Yellowstone in an oftentimes ruthless way that did just that.
However, another character who faced similar challenges in Yellowstone was Beth. After John died, she was working very hard to keep her dad’s dream alive, and she was really the one leading the fight. So, we need to compare Beulah to Beth as well. That’s something Bening implied too, as she told me:
And so when you can kind of tap into those kinds of deep things, like Beth has done, and Kelly was able to do in her amazing acting, that’s kind of where my inspiration is really in things falling apart. And that’s a great character.
Beth really did have to pick up the pieces as they fell apart, especially in the last episodes of Yellowstone. She also leads with confidence and directness that Beulah seems to have, too. They are two powerful women, and when I spoke to Natalie Alyn Lind, who plays Oreana, about the show, she made that point too, saying this after I asked her about Beulah:
She knows her worth, she knows her power. She is the boss around there, and people respect her. And I think that it’s one of those things with female bosses, specifically where the male perspective and the female perspective, the moment where you are a female, then all of a sudden you’re seen as harsh, but when you’re a male, you’re powerful. And I think it’s really interesting to see her in this position, and Kelly [as] Beth has done such a great job of that balance between being powerful but not harsh. And that’s what Annette does so well.
So, yeah, while we can easily compare Beulah to John, the parallels between her and Beth are clear too, and that makes this show so incredibly interesting.
That’s because the Jacksons are so similar to the Duttons, but they’re framed as the antagonists as Rip and Beth enter this new world. However, when you boil it down, Beulah is fighting for the same things John and Beth battled for on Yellowstone. So, in every sense of the word, Beth has met her match. And that, my friends, sets up quite the conflict as we dive into the world of Dutton Ranch.
