Jacob Dutton is Harrison Ford’s best late-career role, a grizzled, no-nonsense, and honest rancher and family man straddling the Wild West and the 20th century. He’s the brother to James (played by Tim McGraw in the limited series 1883, which established the Dutton family as Montana landlords/cattlemen) and great-great-uncle to Kevin Costner’s John Dutton III, the main character for four and a half seasons of Taylor Sheridan’s popular, over-the-top modern-day boots-and-rope opera Yellowstone.
In the latest and final season of 1923, which premiered February 23 and is Paramount+’s second lavish prequel to Yellowstone, Ford’s character leads a strong returning cast, including Dame Helen Mirren as Irish-born Cara Dutton, Jacob’s wise, rugged wife, and Brandon Sklenar as the Dutton’s eldest, Spencer, a big game hunter with a big heart and a big gun.
The season-one finale of the show was a series of cliffhangers—the Dutton’s vast property was threatened, villains escaped justice, and Spencer and his new love, an English noblewoman, were separated at sea. In season two, these stories—and more—are picked up, and all-new yeehaw conflicts are introduced, but the primary themes of loyalty to loved ones, to the land, and to the good ol’ days remain. Dutton has no time for modern technologies like telephones or motorcars; he’s just an aging wrangler trying to live through the winter. And in this season, the winter is one of the bad guys.
This is a solid Western about the end of the old ways with pitch-perfect production values, hokey dialogue, and actors who know what they’re doing. Especially Ford. The Taylor Sheridan Expanded TV Universe is full of tough-talking hombres—manly men who wear cowboy hats and stern frowns. In Yellowstone, the Duttons operate almost like a crime family, willing to do anything to protect their land from big-city developers. The masculinity in Sheridan’s television work isn’t toxic; it’s triumphant. His characters live in a man’s world and are willing to do anything to defend their traditions. Sheridan’s heroes are either strong and silent like Costner, whose Montana landowner loves to glower while sippin’ coffee from a mug, or they’re strong but never shut up, like Billy Bob Thornton in Landman, a silly tale of vulgar roughnecks fighting liberals, Mexican drug lords, and exploding oil rigs in today’s West Texas.
Sheridan, Yellowstone‘s co-creator and showrunner, wrote two excellent big-screen western noirs, Sicario and Hell Or High Water. His television work is more melodramatic but popular, especially with libertarians and city slickers and libertarian city slickers.Costner’s creative marriage to Sheridan was rocky. He quit the show in 2023—and announced the departure a year later—to direct his own epic western movie, Horizon: An American Saga, a planned four-parter that should end up being as long as any season of prestige TV. The breakup makes sense in retrospect because Costner always looked bored in Yellowstone. (Spoiler alert: Sheridan had John Dutton murdered by assassins who made it look like a suicide.)
Meanwhile, Landman’s Thornton is a smart actor and delivers multiple monologues about the oil industry that are factually misleading but probably dramatically satisfying to climate-change deniers. He’s naturally charismatic and is renting that charm to Sheridan for what one should hope is a hefty paycheck.
But neither of these portraits of manhood are as inspired as Ford’s Jacob Dutton. Sheridan is on a mission from god to sell conservative Americans the gender norms they want to see in the world, and Ford is his best messenger. He is the last of a generation of movie stars who came of age in the shadows of Gary Cooper and John Wayne, the original strong, silent, shoot-’em-up types and the men many in Ford’s generation looked up to.
Ford is also one of the busiest men in Hollywood at the moment: He just starred in a Marvel movie, playing a President with a secret. (Said secret was spoiled in the trailer long ago: Ford gets to rage as “Red Hulk.”) And last year, he reprised his role as grouchy Dr. Paul Rhoades in Apple TV+’s sharp comedy Shrinking with Jason Segel. Over the past decade, he’s re-embraced the roles that made him millions and immortal: Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Rick Deckard from Blade Runner. In each performance, the famously cranky celebrity tweaked his creations, and these legacy sequels feature surprisingly thoughtful work from him. He even starred in a faithful big-budget remake of Jack London’s classic novel Call Of The Wild, which didn’t get enough love. He really is one of our greatest make-believe good guys.
1923‘s villains all exemplify the worst in men, even if Jerome Flynn’s murderous Scottish sheep baron suffers from some self-awareness. Sebastian Roché is particularly good/gross as Father Renaud, an abusive, weaselly Catholic priest who runs an orphanage where nuns torture Indigenous girls. But Sheridan’s pen is far from perfect: He wrote the great Timothy Dalton a terrible character. Dalton’s menacing, grinning businessman, Whitfield, is a sexual sadist prone to grandiloquent soliloquies. Sheridan’s characters all too often parody themselves. But thankfully, Ford’s talent is to summon a relaxed authenticity for the camera effortlessly, which is put to good use here.
The women in 1923 are also some of Sheridan’s most fully realized, aside from the cast of his taut spy thriller Lioness, which stars Zoe Saldaña as a CIA operative balancing family and the war on terror. (That show features more than one true badass woman, including Nicole Kidman as an icy, all-powerful intelligence bigwig.) In 1923, Cara Dutton stoically performs her duties, toiling even though she is the queen of a kingdom of beef. She also genuinely cares about the rough-around-the-edges men who work for her husband, acting as both a worrier and a warrior. (On more than one occasion, she’s picked up a shotgun and stood her ground.) She is good-humored too, and the show’s sweetest, most human scenes are between her and Jacob, quiet moments in bed while they share their hopes and fears.
In stark contrast to Cara, Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton, a very popular Yellowstone character, is a right-wing version of a manic pixie dream girl, a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, barbwire-sharp sort who can take a punch. Beth is also a psycho, much like the other men on the Dutton ranch. She can hang, sure, but she’s still a superficial character. But compared to the women who populate Landman, she’s Hedda Gabler. In Landman, Thornton’s character’s wife and daughter are both vapid and horny. The show also includes a widow and a high-priced lawyer, and those two are written respectfully, if one-dimensionally. All the women in that show, save for the widow, are either drooled over by older men or talked down to by those same dudes.
Sheridan’s TV empire seeks to elevate yesterday’s values, but more often than not, like in Yellowstone, he’s just serving up sex and violence to crowds hungry for heaping portions of both. There is plenty of gunplay in 1923 but Ford and Mirren, as pioneer types in their golden years, add a melancholic romance that’s missing in the writer’s other series. Ford, in particular, recalls old Hollywood’s vision of masculinity: hard men with soft hearts for the weak and put-upon, solitary gunslingers who will do the right thing even if the right thing isn’t popular. Ford’s Jacob will go it alone if he has to—but his wife won’t be far behind.
