Yellowstone, despite its fascinating narrative, fails to present an original vision when it comes to character building.
While Yellowstone has created a niche for itself, harboring a clan of loyal followers into accepting its ruggedly flashy cowboy lifestyle, Taylor Sheridan’s series also poses its own risks and dangers. And that danger cuts much deeper than the superficial power struggles and political machinations that can cause a family to tear itself apart.
What Sheridan presents in his lavish vision at the heart of Montana’s charming wilderness is an idealized picture of a modern-day Game of Thrones. Although the storyline sells like hotcakes, what it does leave behind is a sour taste in its execution that feels more like the Westerosi series’s Season 8, despite aiming for the grandeur of Season 6.
Yellowstone Gets Its Details Wrong With the Duttons
Kelly Reilly’s character as Beth Dutton is a leading contributor to the most fundamental problem with Yellowstone. Seen as a symbol of empowerment, there are layers of mental, emotional, and generational trauma that go behind the character of Beth Dutton. This was done to elevate her as a symbol of resistance and power only enables the continued cycle of abuse and destruction.
But beyond Reilly’s arc lies a pristine and perfect model character played by Luke Grimes’ Kayce Dutton. As aptly described by one Reddit user:
Kayce, one of the few characters I kind of liked, is still over-the-top ridiculous. Overall, he is simply a straight-up male fantasy. An ex-navy SEAL and Navy Cross recipient, married to a drop-dead gorgeous woman, who is also the baddest of badasses. He killed like three people within the first two episodes let alone over the course of the series, and of course a couple of these people weren’t just your average bad dudes. No, they were meth cooks who doubled as pedophiles. I won’t even get into the militia plot line.
While that does not sufficiently sum up the arc of Kayce Dutton, it does summarily present the character in a superficial light. And if not for Taylor Sheridan’s other works, one would sincerely doubt his ability to write characters that are anything more than skin-deep.
Luke Grimes’ Kayce Dutton: Victim or Stereotype?
After Taylor Sheridan’s recent fiasco with the latest seasons of Yellowstone, it is clear that his writing has taken a turn for the worse. However, the audience can hardly guess whether it is a cause of him being stretched too thin, or if Sheridan has simply resorted to lazy writing to fill the pages of his script due to Paramount’s $500 million deadline (via The Wrap).
If it is the latter, the character of Kayce Dutton could simply be a victim of ingrained bias and stereotype. For decades, literature and cinema have painted the picture of a perfect son, the black sheep of the family, and the villain. As such, Kayce, Jaime, and Beth are tailored into their respective roles without much coloring outside the lines.
Luke Grimes’ Kayce is the epitome of the perfect-son stereotype as such, failing to reflect a character of his own, shining only so far as his role would allow, leaving little impact behind, and growing only in correlation to the rise/fall of his sidekicks.
Yellowstone is streaming now on Paramount+