In season 5 of Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone,” there are plenty of power couples vying for your attention and affection. Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley) and his conspiring new girlfriend Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) are plotting to instate Jamie as governor of Montana, while Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) continue their epic romance after finally tying the knot in the season 4 finale. The unlikely coupling of the tomboyish Teeter (Jen Landon) and Colby (Denim Richards) is undeniably the sweetest relationship that’s emerged on the hit show, and the chemistry between Landon and Jackson is reminiscent of old playground crushes where there’s more hair-pulling going on than any actual kissing. Working together on the Yellowstone Ranch, Teeter set her eyes on Colby early on in the bunkhouse and never looked back, even if she probably could have seduced any roughneck in town.
There is a childlike quality to how Teeter flirts with Colby, and seeing their relationship become more and more serious over time has been a delight for fans. Landon saw Teeter’s infatuation with Colby as inevitable, so she wasn’t exactly surprised when Sheridan’s writing started to go in that direction. “I knew she was gonna hook in on him and so when I read it in the script, I was like, ‘yup,'” she said in an interview with ScreenRant. “Y’know, there’s something where she can really ruffle his feathers. He’s got a lot of feathers to ruffle, y’know?” Sure, Teeter likes to mess with Colby, but there’s a lot more to their relationship than that.
‘There’s just no ego’
Besides the irresistible urge to get under his skin, there was a deeper reason why Teeter and Colby ended up together, and Landon zeroed in on why they gravitated towards each other:
“There’s a sort of, I always felt there was gonna be some sort of unspoken connection that neither of them would talk about, which is the function of being a little bit of an outsider. Denim Richards. Colby stands out. Teeter stands out.”
The nomadic lifestyle of a ranch hand already makes Teeter and Colby feel uprooted in life, but they’ve finally found what they think is a permanent home at the Dutton family ranch. Every cowboy in the bunkhouse is already somewhat of an outsider, it’s just that Teeter and Colby are a slightly different kind of outcast, which inevitably brings them closer together. “So, I think there’s that unspoken relating on that level,” explained Landon. “And, I don’t know for Teeter, like ‘no means yes’ and I don’t want to make it that. There’s just no ego.”
Not feeling self-important with each other sets Teeter and Colby apart from the other romances on the show that, in the past, have been filled with ego and ambition. Teeter’s advances paid off, and now that they’ve made it official, the storyline has decided to split them up for the first time. As the mid-season finale ended, Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) is forced to round up some of the ranch hands, including Teeter, to drive their cattle south to Texas in order to save the herd from a deadly bacterial infection called brucellosis. With Colby staying behind back in Montana, it’s unclear if they’ll see each other again by season’s end.