A large swath of TV over the past few years has focused on one thing: murder. Solving one, identifying the eccentric suspects among an ensemble cast, and most likely turning the whole investigation into a ten-episode whodunit. Just rinse, repeat, and act like the meal never goes stale. I won’t name names, but you know who you are.
Dutton Ranch isn’t that kind of series, and Taylor Sheridan’s bucking of TV trends is partly why damn near every series he writes or produces is a hit. It’s not as if there isn’t violence or romance or any of the other traditional elements that make a typical TV drama purr. It’s that the best of the Sheridan-verse takes on plots that no other series can. Take, for instance, Rip (Cole Hauser) and Beth’s (Kelly Reilly) dilemma of a ranch full of diseased cattle in Dutton Ranch episode 4, titled “Start with a Bullet.” It’s the first problem in a while that I’ve seen on TV and genuinely thought, Wait. What do you do if that happens?
Murder? Catch the killer. Injured? Take ’em to The Pitt. Haunted town? Lift the curse. But what happens to a rancher after they’re forced to kill their entire population of livestock just to stop a disease from spreading? Is there insurance for this? Is the Dutton Ranch doomed? Is there any retribution available to ranchers outside of Rip burning the man’s trailer to the ground in an act of revenge? I have so many questions.
We’ll need to wait until episode 5 to find out what happens next. Episode 4, for the most part, just deals with the heavy loss of Rip having to kill his entire herd of cattle and then bury them in a big ditch—including the calf he saved from the wildfire in the premiere. You might think it wouldn’t hit as hard as a major character death on a prestige HBO drama, but it does. Dutton Ranch treats the tragedy like it’s the greatest sin on earth. As Rip warns his cowboys before the massacre begins, “This’ll be one of those days that follow you to the grave.”
Elsewhere in episode 4, Carter (Finn Little) continues to skip school and learn cowboying from guest star Raymond McKinnon. I could go without the Carter plots on Dutton Ranch. This week’s scene of Lady Montague driving Juliet back to Lady Capulet’s castle in her Ram 3500 was at least a little more entertaining than last week’s zero-to-100 romance between Carter and Oreana (Natalie Alyn Lind)—and that’s mostly just because Beth threatened to ruin her life if she didn’t play her cards right.
But any Deadwood fan will be excited to see McKinnon as this week’s guest star. The actor—who played the western drama’s Reverened H.W. Smith in some of the best episodes of TV I’ve ever seen—just pals around with Carter and pounds beers this episode. Occassionally he teaches the young Dutton rancher life lessons like “Rule one, two, and three is: Never turn down free food.”
Episode 4 also features a brief scene between Everett (Ed Harris) and Beulah (Annette Bening) that I wish received a little more time to breathe. Ed Harris’s character breezes through a monologue about their shared past, including a bit about a tire swing hanging off an oak tree in his backyard that he can’t bring himself to cut down.
“More than anything, I just want the ropes to rot so that I don’t have to hear it creak every time the breeze blows by,” he says. “I mean, part of me still thinks it’s Levi out there. And then reality kicks in. The wound rips open again. But the guilt of cutting it down? Shit, Beulah. If we could go back … but we’ve got too many demons to ever be good for each other.”
That’s a lot to infer here. This is the first mention of someone named Levi, and it doesn’t take much to put together that the couple might’ve grown apart following the grief of sharing a son who died. I’m sure this is far from the last scene we’ll see between Everett and Beulah. But still, for an event between them that’s potentially as emotional as losing a child, it’s a shame that we don’t spend more than two to three minutes on Everett’s story before we’re cutting back to Carter learning how to lasso. So hopefully we’ll sit with it a bit more the next time Everett and Beulah share the screen together.
Until then, you can find me lost in a Google rabbit hole as I try to learn about ranching disasters. Because unless Rip and Beth find a solution next week, Dutton Ranch did a mighty good job of making this cattle massacre look like the worst thing that’s ever happened to this family.