Chad Feehan

Watch the first two episodes of Dutton Ranch (2026) and you can see what Chad Feehan wanted. Beth and Rip, lifted out of Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone, are given a ranch, a boy, a bunkhouse and a lot of cattle, and the family, the land and the bodies are left behind. The pace drops to a walk. Kelly Reilly is as ferocious as she ever was, and Annette Bening and Ed Harris are there to give her someone worth fighting. For a while it looks as though somebody has decided to make a quiet Western out of the loudest franchise on television, and we were interested.

Feehan came to television from small films. He wrote and directed Beneath the Dark (2010), then took staff jobs on Southland and Rectify (2013), wrote for Banshee (2013) and rose through the producing ranks on Ray Donovan (2013). We rated Rectify highly and Banshee well, but those were other people's programmes, and a staff writer's share of a series like Ray McKinnon's cannot be read off the screen. His first series of his own was Lawmen: Bass Reeves (2023), eight episodes about the historical lawman, made with David Oyelowo and with Sheridan as executive producer; we have not reviewed it. He has said he tries to get the tone onto the page before anything else, in the action lines, and Dutton Ranch bears that out. The mood is there from the first shot and the plot takes a long time to catch up.

Length is the trouble. There is a good six-part series in Dutton Ranch and it has been spread across nine, so a grievance raised in the second episode is still being nursed in the seventh, and the business between Beth and Beulah, which ought to be the spine, is rationed as though there were seasons to come. A school subplot turns up that nobody asked for. Around the fourth episode we noticed we had stopped waiting for anything to happen and were watching the cattle, and we were irritated at being bored by a series with Reilly, Bening and Harris in it. Feehan can cast and he can set a scene. Sheridan's series was often absurd but it was never slow; Feehan's is calm and handsome and, for long stretches, empty.

He left Dutton Ranch before its first episode aired and a new showrunner takes the second season, so the season we reviewed is the only complete statement of his we have, and we hold our verdict loosely. Christina Alexandra Voros, who has directed for him twice, is a collaborator worth keeping an eye on. What we would like to see next is Feehan with six episodes and a story that ends, which is roughly the shape of Lawmen: Bass Reeves. On one season's evidence he knows what a series should feel like better than he knows when it should stop.