10 Most Annoying Yellowstone Characters, Ranked – TVLine

Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount juggernaut “Yellowstone”is a brutal neo-Western gift that keeps on giving. It already has multiple prequel series, and Luke Grimes’ Kayce Dutton is set to continue the parent show’s story with a new team on “Y: Marshals”– one of the many spin-offs to come. If the original show is anything to go by, one thing fans can expect from these spin-offs is a brand new cavalcade of incredibly annoying characters.After all, abrasive figures are an essential component of the “Yellowstone” DNA.

As anyone who’s familiar with the franchiseknows, nice people don’t last very long in Sheridan’s Montana. John Dutton (Kevin Costner)and his children are hard-headed and tough, and many of the figures in their orbit can and do give them a run for their money.Because of this, “Yellowstone”is full of bullish, confrontational, and outright annoying characters. Let’s take a moment to rank 10 of the most irritating figures on the show.

Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) would stand out in any show’s character gallery. She’s prone to grandstanding and deliberately provoking people. She seems to relish being as annoying as humanly possible. She routinely challenges, attacks, insults, and walks over people left and right. Reilly’s character is so abrasive, in fact, that the very existence of Beth Dutton made HBO reject “Yellowstone” because the network feared her outspoken nature would alienate female viewers. As such, she has all the potential in the world to make it to the top of a list like this … and she’d probably wear that number one spot as a badge of honor.

There’s no doubt that Beth is a confrontational and harsh person. But does having zero filter necessarily mean that she’s annoying? Even though Beth runs rampant throughout the show, she’s not a one-note chaos magnet but a complicated person with her own personal issues, growth, and eventual fulfillment. What’s more, her incredibly traumatizing backstory of Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley)misleading her into getting a hysterectomy goes a long way toward explaining the chip on her shoulder. All in all, there’s no denying that Beth’s emotional spectrum tends to move on a sliding scale between feisty and furious, but she’s still far from the most annoying character “Yellowstone”has in its roster.

What happens when “Yellowstone”attempts to introduce a liberal activist character? As Summer Higgins (PiperPerabo)proves in Season 4, the end result is a caricature who wallows in the plot with little reason or rhyme.Summer is effectively a mishmash of every stereotypical characteristic that someone who comes from a cowboy background might imagine an environmental activist to have. She hails from Portland, Oregon. She’s a vegan, and wildly idealistic to the point of compromising her common sense. So, of course she ends up diving headfirst in Dutton business, starting a relationship with John and clashing with Beth.

Instead of coming across as a genuine, multifaceted character, Summer is a conflict machine who always seems to take the exact opposite stance to whoever she happens to be interacting with. Combine this with the show’s struggle to decide what it wants to do with Summer, and the character never really seems to fit in.

All in all, “Yellowstone” largely uses Summer’s annoying and somewhat condescending nature as a handy shortcut to create conflict. When Kelly Reilly spoke to TVLine about Beth taking aim at Summer in “Yellowstone”Season 5, she highlighted a very specific reason why Beth — as well as “Yellowstone” fans in general — would dislike the activist character. “She sees Summer as an enemy, someone who has absolutely no respect for their way of life. [Summer and her fellow protesters] just come in with this very basic understanding, thinking that [ranchers are] all just rednecks,” Reilly said.

Monica Dutton (Kelsey Asbille) falls in the annoying character category because of her role on the series. Her “Yellowstone”storylines tend to yank the show away from its core strengths, and her story arcs are nigh-invariably massive bummers. If Monica tries to break up a fight, there will be a freak accident that leads to a grievous injury. If she’s recuperating from an injury, she’ll start an affair that strains her marriage with Kayce Dutton. If she’s expecting a child, there will be a fateful car accident.

Monica starts out as a middle school teacher before upgrading to a professor gigat Montana State University. As such, she has little to do with ranching. Instead, her educator role allowsTaylor Sheridan to use Monica as a mouthpiece, and the audience is treated to several lectures about America’s history over the course of the series.

With the exception of the affair storyline, none of this is really on Monica herself, let alone the very capable Asbille. Unfortunately, the character just seems to grind the plot to a halt at regular intervals, which can get frustrating — especially since Monica’s stories usually steer clear from the Duttons’ more exciting machinations.

Kayce Dutton’s family life just isn’t the most interesting part of “Yellowstone,”is it? Admittedly, Kayce and Monica’s son Tate (Brecken Merrill) has the disadvantage of being a kid in a gritty Western-themed show, which is rarely an easy assignment. However, it doesn’t help at all that Tate’s agency in the plot is close to zero.

TateDutton rarely even gets a chance to be actively annoying. For much of the show, his function is to act as a tagalong — a character adults can either argue over or deliver exposition to. Occasionally, the show throws poor Tate headfirst into trouble, using him to jump-start a handy rescue mission storyline. Neither is a particularly good look, and it doesn’t help that even some of Tate’s best scenes tend to be full of moping and generic “cute kid” stuff.

Granted, Tate does get the occasional exciting moment. He fights a rattlesnake in the Season 1 episode “NoGood Horses,”and saves her mother from a home invader in the Season 4 premiere, “Half the Money.” Still, these are just occasional flashes in a pan that’s otherwise full of mildly annoying blandness.

Roarke Morris (Josh Holloway) is a cool and affable guy with pearly-white teeth and the manner of an independently wealthy man with no worries in the world. He’s an annoyingly perfect, chiseled figure in a show that’s usually all about imperfection. In other words, Roarke is grating from the second he enters “Yellowstone”Season 3 as a mysterious fisherman who turns out to be a high-powered real estate investor.

Holloway’s smug performance is excellent, but Roarke’s character itself is the white-collar answer to Piper Perabo’s activist caricature, Summer. Roarke has a grand total of three traits. One ishis open desire to acquire the Duttons’ land. The other is his hidden duplicity, which is seen in his devious plan to fund Wade Morrow’s (Boots Southerland) mission to provoke John Dutton into a violent confrontation. The third and final one is his fondness of fly fishing, which the show milks for all it’s worth with copious trout metaphors.

“Being rich and liking fishing”is ultimately no substitute for personality, and “Yellowstone” doesn’t even bother to pretend that Roarke is complex enough to be in it for the long haul. After all, the mogul starts flirting with Beth Dutton in his very first scene, which is rarely a great move for a new character. This decision effectively starts Roarke’s countdown clock before Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) gives the villain a faceful of rattlesnake inthe Season 4 premiere, “Half the Money.”

“Yellowstone”is a neo-Western drama. As such, a great way to craft an annoying character is to make them seem like they have absolutely no business being on a neo-Western drama. Few other “Yellowstone” characters fit this mold better than Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), who lands in Montana like a transplant from a completely different show.

Sarah is a late-game villain who enters the Dutton clan’s orbit in “Yellowstone” Season 5. As the latest heavy-hitter of the powerful Market Equities company, she isn’t a character as much as she is a wrecking ball. She’s an imposing white-collar femme fatale who openly admits that she’s only in it for the money, and who’s not above hiring assassins to get the job done. Her de facto role in the show is to fly in, break stuff, and leave the way antagonists tend to exit “Yellowstone” — with a bang.

At this point, the show has already juggled plenty of corporate and political balls alongside its ranch-defending core premise. As such, this cutthroat corporate lawyer’s addition to the white-collar side of the equation is an easy red flag for those who want more focus on horses and 10-gallon hats … especially considering the role she plays in John Dutton’s death.

Like many others on this list, Walker (Ryan Bingham)made it on TVLine’s list of most memorable “Yellowstone”characters. Still, this doesn’t make the show’s resident ranch hand viewpoint character any less annoying, especially later in the game.

Early on, Walker is an important figure who serves as the audience’s viewpoint character at the bottom rungs of the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch career path. Despite being a convicted felon himself, he’s as a relative innocent whose struggles to steer clear of the ranch’s shadiest activities put him at odds with Rip Wheeler(Cole Hauser).

However, Walker’s role as the show’s rare voice of reason diminishes as the plot progresses. After Kayce Dutton helps him escape the ranch unscathed in “Yellowstone”Season 2, Walker ends up returning in the fold for Season 3 … and promptly loses his mojo. Slowly, the character becomes just another violent ranch hand who’s all in on the requisite violence, and his meandering side quests have the uncannyability to grind an episode’s progress to a halt.

In all fairness, much of Jamie Dutton’sjob on “Yellowstone” revolves around being annoying. As the sole suit in the Dutton clan, he’s often framed as a corporate-minded sleaze even during the early days when he still stands by his family. By the time he starts exploring his own path and slowly turns into an adversary, Jamie has a named seat at the show’s roundtable of annoying characters.

Even though he’s adopted, Jamie seems to share John Dutton’s ability to make awful decisions. Throughout his time on the show, he puts this questionable skill to good use, making bad alliances and even worse power moves wherever he goes. The chronological first of these decisions — the hysterectomy he tricked Beth Dutton into getting when they were young — earns him a bitter, lifelong enemy. Things don’t exactly get any better later on, and Jamie’s absurdly misguided decision-making ends up getting his hands increasingly bloody as the series progresses.

Jamie isn’t entirely without his saving graces, though.Much is made aboutJohn’s tendency to treat his adopted son as a downtrodden lackey, and Jamie’s overall pariah status isproof that a profoundly annoying character can also be complex. Wes Bentley has noted that Jamie is not a clear-cut villain on “Yellowstone,”and it’s hard to argue against the point. Even so, the character’s constant bad decisions place him firmly in the annoying character category.

John Dutton III, powerful cattle rancher and eventual Governor of Montana, gets a lot of leeway. From a viewer’s standpoint, a lot of this has to do with Kevin Costner’s undeniable presence, which makes John so magnetic that it can be easy to forget how deeply grating he really is.

Strip John of his gravitas and weird old school morals, and you’re left with a man who causes thrice as many problems as he solves. Throughout his tenure on the show, John can generally be relied to make the worst decision available. His abusive actions cause endless grief to his family and everyone associated with him. His “Train Station” dumping ground is littered with the bodies of his enemies, and the times he actually comes across as likable tend to put him up against someone who’s superficially slimier than he is. In-universe, John is just about the most annoying and dangerous character in the entire show;once the viewer catches wind of his pragmatic depravity, it’s easy to see John as the awful jerk that he is.

To its credit, “Yellowstone”never bothers to hide how bad John is.Costner himself is also well aware of his character’s inherent awfulness. The actor has been vocal about hisown ideas for “Yellowstone’s” ending, and noted in a 2025 interview with Entertainment Tonight that the Duttons should all go to prison.

Taylor Sheridan had his reasons to write every “Yellowstone”episode himself.However, the jury is out on whether he actually had to write himself in the show as Travis Wheatley, the horse trainer and rodeo star who can do no wrong in a show that usually thrives on portraying characters who misstep.

Granted, Sheridan’s real-life combination of acting and cowboy chops makes him a natural choice to play an arrogant horse master who’s able to outshine others. However, as some fans have pointed out online, Travis’ smug perfection gets awkward. Late-game Travis moments feature scenes like him playing strip poker with Beth Dutton — Travis wins, of course. In the Season 5 episode “Give The World Away,” we even find out that Travis has a gorgeous young girlfriend (played by supermodel Bella Hadid, naturally), who takes some time to gush over his sublime riding skills with Beth.

TVLine isn’t opposed to a great TV cameo by any means. It’s just that Travis Wheatley overstays his welcome until he starts to come across as a transparent personal wish-fulfillment figure that seems less like a character and more like the “Yellowstone”creator’s personal flex.