“Yellowstone” executives apparently hated Kelly Reilly’s character of Beth Dutton, so much so that the show’s creator, Taylor Sheridan, lost out on a potentially major network deal just to keep her in the series. And we couldn’t be more appreciative.
What do wannabe powerful men hate more than each other? Powerful women. And the most powerful fictional woman is none other than Beth Dutton, the modern day matriarch of the Yellowstone-Dutton ranch in Taylor Sheridan’s hit series “Yellowstone.” As much as Beth might hate being part of the Dutton family, her attitude has spawned a whole new way to look at the way women are portrayed in the media.
It turns out that “Yellowstone” was almost an HBO show before it became the game-changing series for Paramount+. Sheridan told The Hollywood Reporter that HBO “took issue” with Beth.
“‘We think she’s too abrasive,’” Sheridan claims the execs told him. “‘We want to tone her down. Women won’t like her.’ They were wrong because Beth says the quiet part out loud every time. When someone’s rude to you in a restaurant, or cuts you off in the parking lot, Beth says the thing you wish you’d said.” And we love her for it!
Sheridan literally hung up on HBO when they made the comment, and it was probably the best thing he could have done. The world is a much, much better place for it.
Unlike wannabe alpha males and suit-wearing Karen types, alpha females don’t have to brand themselves as such. They just naturally walk all over these slugs that only survive into adulthood thanks to modern medicine.
Having spent more than my fair share of time around these cripplingly lame executives and so-called “decision-makers,” I find it so cosmically beautiful that these suits hated Beth, and she’s now the biggest female character on television. These people have inflated egos and zero confidence to back it up, which is why a bunch of presumably really ugly women also hate Sheridan’s writing for Beth.
Unless you’re a genuinely crappy person, so-called powerful people hate anyone with legitimate confidence. And my hope is that Beth’s fire continues to inspire women to protect themselves as well as any man and to create a lil’ chaos here and there.