Yellowstone's New John Dutton Has Been In The Works Since Kevin Costner's Era

Published Sep 29, 2026, 6:00 PM 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’s John Dutton replacement was set up years ago, that doesn’t make it any less sad to see the series wind its way toward this seemingly inevitable conclusion. Taylor Sheridan’s screenplays for Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River marked the screenwriter out as one to watch back in the late 2010s. However, it was the ratings juggernaut Yellowstone that cemented him as one of the biggest names on television. Like the producer behind Netflix’s divisive true crime hit Monster, Ryan Murphy, Sheridan’s ubiquity has not necessarily been paired with critical success. In fact, some of Sheridan’s shows, like the prison drama Mayor of Kingstown, were written off by critics as laughably self-serious, comically macho efforts. Even the Yellowstone franchise itself, although it has grown to include the prequels 1883 and 1923 and the sequels Dutton Ranch and Marshals, isn’t immune from these criticisms. As Marshals season 2’s October 4 premiere date approaches, it can be tempting to limit criticisms of the CBS series to its stylistic shortcomings. While it was marketed as a procedural, Marshals season 1 mostly held onto the serialized storytelling of Yellowstone, giving viewers little reason to get invested in most of the eponymous Marshals in favor of focusing on Luke Grimes’ conflicted Kayce Dutton. However, as the Yellowstone franchise’s replacement John Dutton proves, Marshals also has issues at the level of storytelling. Kayce Dutton Is Slowly Becoming His Father CBS As Marshals continues, it is becoming increasingly clear that the show is setting up Kayce to be a mirror of his father. John Dutton was a paranoid, petty billionaire who never enjoyed his massive fortune, instead spending the last years of his life constantly obsessing over enemies both real and perceived. Spending all of his time and not a little of his fortune on desperately holding onto the titular Yellowstone ranch, Dutton eventually fell victim to his own hubris when he was killed in a hit ordered by his own son, Jamie. Jamie’s ruthless, placid attitude toward murdering his own father in the name of business came directly from John’s teachings, making the death of Kevin Costner’s character a bleakly ironic end to the character’s sad life. Kayce, in contrast, had ambitions to be something more than his father. From the moment he left the ranch to serve in the military, Kayce hoped to be part of something bigger than himself, as he had witnessed first hand just how mentally and spiritually deleterious his father’s self-obsession was. Of course, Kayce not only returned to his home state after a traumatizing tour of duty, but he eventually also returned to the Yellowstone ranch itself when he decided he wanted his son Tate to have a relationship with his grandfather. This was, bear in mind, the man who branded Kayce’s chest before Yellowstone began because Kayce refused to force his love interest Monica to get an abortion. As such, Kayce still didn'tt want Tate and John to become too close. However, the point was eventually nullified when John died at the hands of Sarah and Jamie’s contract killers, leaving Kayce at a loose end. Kayce did atone for some of his father’s sins by returning the ranch to its rightful owners, but he remained haunted by the specter of his father’s pitiless brutality, which John always masqueraded as a deep and abiding care for his family. Yellowstone Was Hinting At Kayce's Fate From The Start Image via MovieStillsDB In case John mutilating his son during his childhood didn’t make this clear, his claims that he did everything for the good of his family were laughably untrue. Yellowstone’s John Dutton alienated his children so badly that one of them orchestrated his murder while another left for a war-torn nation just to avoid his father. Of the trio, only Beth truly idolized her father, and this resulted in her becoming an equally paranoid, embittered loner obsessed with maintaining control of her own ranch. While Jamie always had a detached approach to the family legacy and was more interested in inheriting his father’s ruthless business tactics, up to and including killing John, Kayce was always the Dutton trying the hardest to fight his fate. As such, it was almost inevitable that he would end up becoming his father's replacement in Marshals. After all, this is almost exactly what happens to Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy . While Yellowstone has been compared, by some generous critics, to The Godfather movies, the show’s story is more akin to campy, soapy Western classics like Dynasty and Dallas. This is never more obvious than in the story of John and Kayce, as The Godfather movies made the ideological ruptures between generations of the Corelone family clear, whereas Yellowstone and Marshals fail to find a similarly meaningful difference between Kayce and his late father. Much like the aforementioned Mayor of Kingstown, Marshals is too enamored with the glamour of violence and brooding maxims about the importance of family to actually articulate why Kayce imitating John is a bad thing. To some viewers, it might seem self-evident. John is the sort of man who branded his own son’s chest for refusing to force a woman to obtain an abortion so, of course, Kayce wouldn’t want to replicate this behavior. Kayce Becoming His Father Works For Now, But Can't Be Where His Story Ends Image courtesy of MovieStillsDb However, afraid of taking violence too seriously or hurting the show’s escapist appeal, Marshals consistently softens the violence of John’s worldview and its consequences. In episode 7, Kayce tells Fallon to repair her relationship with her father while she still can, rather than noting that sometimes, parents are so patently useless at parenting that their own business lessons lead their children to hire assassins to kill them. Later in season 1, Kayce comes within a hair’s breadth of killing the former Yellowstone ranch hand Neil Lamb in cold blood because of what he knows about the Dutton family’s dirty history. Even though he could have resolved the situation by helping Lamb across the border instead, thus neutralizing the threat without violence, Kayce’s knee-jerk response was to reach for the trigger. However, Cal stops Kayce before he can truly become the new John, meaning the show once again steps back from actually addressing what made John Dutton such a grotesque failure in the first place. While Marshals can continue to simply turn Kayce into John Dutton 2.0, eventually, Yellowstone’s sequel needs to explore why this is a bad thing in some meaningful depth. Release Date 2026 - 2026-00-00 Network CBS Showrunner Spencer Hudnut Directors Christopher Chulack, Greg Yaitanes Writers Spencer Hudnut, Tom Mularz, Dana Greenblatt Creator(s) Spencer Hudnut