Yellowstone's New John Dutton Is Taylor Sheridan's Best Twist Yet

Published Oct 16, 2026, 9:31 AM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While the Yellowstone franchise has long set up Kayce as the heir to John Dutton’s unenviable legacy, the cleverest twist that Taylor Sheridan ever wrote might be the true identity of the Kevin Costner character’s successor. Only ten years ago, it would have been almost impossible to believe that Taylor Sheridan would have not one, not two, but 11 or 12 seasons of TV in the works in 2026.

By 2016, the screenwriter had marked himself out as a name to watch with his sharp screenplays for Sicario and Hell or High Water. A year later, Wind River would score him another hit, and the movie’s success would result in Paramount taking a risk with Sheridan’s small-screen Neo-Western family saga Yellowstone. What followed would soon become one of the biggest franchises on TV right now, and a hit big enough to spawn over a half dozen other unrelated Sheridan shows.

As well as Yellowstone’s prequels 1883 and 1923 and its sequels Marshals and Dutton Ranch, Sheridan is currently working on the dour prison drama Mayor of Kingstown, the family drama The Madison, the crime comedy Tulsa King and its upcoming spinoff Frisco King, the oil business saga Landman, the spy series Lioness, and the additional upcoming Yellowstone prequel 1944. This absurdly long lineup was all facilitated by Yellowstone’s popularity, which can be largely attributed to its central John Dutton storyline.

Dutton Ranch Proves Beth Is Yellowstone’s New John Dutton (Not Kayce)

Long before Sheridan’s spy shows, dramas about grief, and period Westerns filled the airwaves, the writer/director centered Yellowstone on Kevin Costner’s cold billionaire John Dutton and his attempts to find a worthy successor for his ranching empire among his offspring. Essentially Succession with a ranch instead of a media empire, Yellowstone spent five seasons exposing the paranoia, craven greed, and existential bitterness at the core of Dutton’s life while his three potential successors, Kayce, Beth, and Jamie, vied for his fortune.

Ruthless, paranoid, prone to violence, and obsessed with holding onto his expensive family ranch at any cost, Dutton was secretly a pretty serious criminal mastermind beneath his veneer as a legitimate businessman. Most of his bloodiest crimes, like the outright murder of potential ranch buyers, were carried out by his right-hand man, Cole Hauser’s Rip. This meant John Dutton maintained plausible deniability, but also proved his undoing in the end of Yellowstone’s tragically ironic Dutton story.

Throughout the series, John insisted that lawyers were the human guns of the new Western frontier, as now business was the respectable veneer for old-fashioned turf wars. As a result, John pushed Jamie into a career as a lawyer to represent the ranch’s interests, all the while constantly undermining and insulting Wes Bentley’s simmering character. John insisted Jamie wasn’t his real son thanks to his parentage and ensured Jamie felt alienated, isolated, and unloved while making him a pivotal part of the Yellowstone ranch’s financial empire.

Then, the inevitable occurred. In a twist that was somehow still shocking, despite this setup, Jamie indirectly ordered John’s assassination via his lover, and Costner’s character died a humiliating death at the hands of hired killers near the show’s series finale. The question of who would become the Yellowstone franchise’s new John Dutton in his absence was short-lived, since Beth killed Jamie soon after in a fit of rage, and secretly answered this question in the process.

Beth Is More Like John Than Jamie or Kayce

In many ways, Jamie’s cold, detached thirst for power made him similar to John. However, the show consistently made it clear that Jamie barely cared about family at all, just money and power. In this regard, he was often contrasted with Kayce, a military veteran who left the Yellowstone ranch behind after a teenage fight with his father over his pregnant girlfriend resulted in John permanently branding his youngest son’s chest with the ranch’s logo.

As reinforced repeatedly by Yellowstone’s procedural spinoff Marshals, Kayce never cared about money and power, just family, and even insisted on selling the ranch to the Broken Rock Indian Reservation upon John’s death. This was always the morally correct choice, as the land was originally stolen from the tribe during a historic genocide, but Kayce was also motivated by the death of his love interest, Monica.

Kayce’s choice to prioritize his late wife and child over money and power made it clear that, despite his US Marshal job often affording him opportunities to resort to extreme retributive violence, he isn’t a carbon copy of his amoral father. There is only one Dutton who is impulsive in their decision-making, brutal in their vengeance, and ardent in their paranoid belief that someone will steal their expensive ranch home out from underneath them. In reality, Beth has always been John’s true heir.

In terms of their perspectives on family, money and power, only John and Beth’s worldviews really align. Combining John’s ruthlessness and modicum of business acumen with a willingness to not only play dirty and skirt the law, but also to make almost every conflict personal, Beth had the bloody-handed edge of John, his weaponized view of power, and the same willingness to use defense of her family as an excuse for any level of illegal of immoral activity.

Beth’s John Dutton Parallels Prove Her Yellowstone Story Won’t End Well

Much like The Shield’s dirty cops Shane Vendrell and Vic Mackey constantly excuse their crimes through an appeal to family, only for both to then destroy their families through their greed and avarice, Beth constantly talks about the importance of maintaining control of her ranch even though she knows this same obsession killed her father. To make things worse, she couldn’t even hold onto the Yellowstone after he was murdered.

Instead, in Dutton Ranch season 1, Beth buys a Texan ranch with Rip, putting both of them under massive financial stress to do so, all so she can rebuild an imagined Dutton family reputation. Her near-immediate rivalry with the neighboring 10-Petal Ranch’s Beulah Jackson, as well as her reaction to discovering a drug smuggling ring at the rival ranch, underline just how obsessed Beth is with acquiring more land at any cost.

She’s also even more impulsive and vindictive than John, and if Rip was committed to doing whatever her father said, he’s even more devoted to Beth. Thus, years after Yellowstone’s John got himself killed by his own son, Beth could prove her own worst enemy as Dutton Ranch’s story continues, and she displays that the rotten apple rarely falls far from the tree.