Season 2 of Dutton Ranch will look a little different after the initial showrunner exited the Yellowstone spinoff.
The Hollywood Reporter confirmed on Tuesday, June 30, that Benjamin Cavell would be taking over after working on shows such as Justified, SEAL Team and The Stand.
Cavell is joining the hit Paramount+ series after Chad Feehan stepped down in June. Us Weekly confirmed at the time that Feehan would not return as showrunner after completing work on season 1.
Puck News previously reported that Feehan, 47, stepped away from Dutton Ranch after alleged friction with series stars Cole Hauser and Kelly Reilly, who play Rip Wheeler and Beth Dutton, respectively, among others.
“Showrunners change all the time,” Hauser, 51, told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month. “This business is about adapting.”
He continued: “We’ve been doing this for a long time. Things change. People move on.”
Reilly, 48, had a similar outlook on the shakeup. “It was a really difficult but really satisfying show to make,” she said. “And so was Yellowstone.”
Looking ahead, the actress wanted to focus on the positive. “So is anything worth making,” she concluded. “We’re all creative minds and we all work together and I’m so proud of that.”
Executive producer Christina Voros, meanwhile, broke her silence about Feehan’s reported firing, telling ScreenRant in May that he did “an exceptional job building a world of adversaries for Rip and Beth” in the Yellowstone spinoff.
Voros noted that when it came to “dynamics behind his departure,” she didn’t have much to add. She went on to say that Dutton Ranch had at that point not “come out into the world yet” so a future without Feehan was “beyond” her knowledge on the subject.
The director expressed gratitude to Feehan and his team for “creating a world for these characters to move into.”
Dutton Ranch isn’t the only Taylor Sheridan show to go through showrunner changes. Lioness, Tulsa King and Frisco King have also experienced shifts — and not every show had a showrunner season to season.
Over the years, Sheridan, 56, has acknowledged his preference for not using writers’ rooms, telling The Hollywood Reporter in 2023, “But when you hire a room that may not be motivated by those same qualities — and a writer always wants to take ownership of something they’re writing — and I give this directive and they’re not feeling it, then they’re going to come up with their own qualities. So for me, writers rooms, they haven’t worked.”
The outlet noted that Sheridan wrote in a one-room “cabinet” he built in Wyoming. “I’ve written many episodes in eight to 10 hours,” he claimed at the time.
Dutton Ranch airs on Paramount+ Fridays.
