Bravo has renewed its viral hit “The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys” for a third season, and will begin filming ahead of the Oct. 16 sentencing of family patriarch Steve McBee Sr. The show — which is as if “The Righteous Gemstones” and “Succession” had a reality baby — moved to Bravo from Peacock for its second season, and found success there.
In November 2024, McBee pleaded guilty in federal court to — according to a Department of Justice press release — a “multi-million dollar fraud scheme involving federal crop insurance benefits he was not entitled to receive” from 2018 through 2020. In other words, he falsified reports for the family’s Gallatin, Mo., farm in order to receive subsidies and insurance payments they weren’t authorized to get. In a memo from Oct. 6, prosecutors asked U.S. District Court Judge Stephen R. Bough to sentence McBee to 41 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release and more than $4 million in restitution.
On the show, the economics of McBee Farming Operations are always presented as precarious. Because of these legal problems, McBee appeared only twice in the show’s second season, after taking center stage in Season 1.
According to ratings provided by Bravo, Season 2 of “The McBee Dynasty” — which ran from June 30-Sept. 1 — averaged 1.3 million weekly viewers across platforms. Compared with Season 1, its ratings were up 82% on Peacock and 213% on DVR. The second half of the 10-episode season showed gains of +16% on Peacock and +8% on Bravo through seven-day viewership. In an interesting statistic, about one-third of the second season’s “McBee” audience, Bravo says, “co-viewed with someone else on both Bravo and Peacock, making it a Top 4 Original Series of 2025 on both platforms – fueled by female viewers watching with male viewers.”