I legitimately feel bad for Wes Bentley for having to portray this "character", which is a generous term for what is put on the screen. Yellowstone having weak writing is nothing new, but Jamie Dutton is in a league of its own.

In season one, Jamie was one of the four Dutton children, each of whom had been groomed by their Cowboy Mafia father to have a certain skill set that would help them protect their generational wealth. Jamie was sent to college and then law school and singlehandedly takes care of the millions upon millions of dollars worth of legal trouble that the ranch gets into every season.

However, at some point, Beth went viral online and Taylor Sheridan realized that conservative boomers were going to fund his new ranch, resulting in abandoning any semblance of a real, rounded human being in favor of turning him into a caricature of a college liberal pussy who couldn't cut it as a "real man" in cowboy world.

Every scene of Jamie is him being a sniveling weasel or literally cowering in fear, crying, or on his knees begging Beth to not hurt him. They couldn't even let him be the black sheep of the Dutton family, he is such a natural born bitch boy that the writers shoe-horned in a plot of him being adopted and not genetically a Dutton.

Every single "plot point" is making Jamie a bad guy so that John, Beth, or whoever else can come in, slap him around, and reinforce how weak he is. Early in the series, Beth and Jamie had some degree of animosity but, after she became the show's darling, it wasn't allowed to be reciprocal anymore so they wrote that a teenage Jamie had a teenage Beth sterilized to make him irredeemable.

And the funniest thing about it is that, even with Sheridan doing his absolute best to make Jamie the most despicable character in the show, a ton of the fandom (including myself) find him to be a sympathetic character. Watching his family disown, berate, and turn on him over and over despite the fact that his legal expertise is the only reason they were able to keep the ranch makes his behavior completely understandable.