For six seasons, we watched Dr. Michaela Quinn and Byron Sully fall for each other on the Colorado frontier. Then, on Saturday, October 17, 2026, Jane Seymour sat beside Joe Lando on a stage in Hartford, Connecticut, and confirmed what many fans had long suspected. The Jane Seymour Joe Lando romance was real, and it began while they were making the very first episode.
Seymour, 75, and Lando, 64, had reunited for a Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman panel at 90s Con at the Connecticut Convention Center, according to People, and she told the crowd exactly when they knew. With a laugh, she also explained why it did not last.
Where Was Jane Seymour When ‘Dr. Quinn’ Came Calling?
The role came to her when she had almost nothing left. “Honestly, the minute I came on Dr. Quinn, I was at the lowest ever of my life,” Seymour said at the panel, as reported by People. “I took the job because I was literally penniless and about to lose my home.”
She had told her agent she would do anything, and the offer arrived with a deadline of 10 a.m. the next morning. “I said yes,” she recalled. “At noon, I was on the set trying on costumes.” Filming started the following day.
What followed changed her fortunes. CBS premiered the series on January 1, 1993, and it ran until May 16, 1998, for 150 episodes across six seasons, winning Seymour a Golden Globe for playing the Boston doctor who sets up practice in Colorado Springs. Two TV movies followed in 1999 and 2001. If you watched back then, you could feel the spark between the two leads, and Seymour says it was there from the first day.
What Happened The Day The Flood Hit The Set?
Her first look at Lando stopped her cold. “My feeling was I saw him and I went, ‘Oh my God, I’ve not seen a man that looks that gorgeous,'” she said, adding that she could not remember the last time she had, “except, you know, as an imaginary, you know, romance song or something.”
Then came the line that made headlines. “We really fell in love. That’s a secret. It’s not a secret, is it anymore?”
It took a flash flood to bring it out in the open. People and Parade both report that the water hit the set early in production, and Lando told Seymour to get into his pickup truck before he drove them out. “We got out of there and it was like the craziest thing ever,” she said.
Afterward, the two went out for Mexican food and margaritas, and somewhere over that dinner the truth hit them. “And it took us like $5, and then we realized that, you know, we had actually fallen in love,” Seymour said. The feelings fans saw on screen, she told them, were genuine. “So everything you saw on Dr. Quinn, certainly in the pilot [was real].”
She had hinted at it before. In 2019 she told Us Weekly, “We obviously, clearly loved one another and realized we couldn’t be actually in real-life together,” and she said they “played it” as Michaela and Sully instead. So what kept them apart off camera?
How Did Michaela And Sully Survive The Awkward Years?
Before that answer, there were some hard years. In a June 2026 interview with TVLine, Lando said that during the show, “we didn’t hate each other, but we just didn’t get along.” Seymour called that stretch “very awkward and very difficult.”
Their lives moved on quickly. Seymour married director James Keach in 1993, and she told TVLine that Keach ended up directing the pair’s love scenes, which could not have made things any less awkward. Their twin sons, John and Kristopher, were born on November 30, 1995. Lando married Kirsten Barlow in 1997, and the couple have four children.
On screen, meanwhile, the love story kept building, and Michaela and Sully finally married in the two hour Season 3 finale, “For Better or Worse,” which aired in May 1995.
The tension faded once the series ended. Lando told TVLine it “was just gone,” and the pair reteamed for the Lifetime movie A Christmas Spark in 2022. This year, Lando joined Season 5 of Seymour’s Acorn TV mystery Harry Wild as Pierce Kennedy, an American pathologist.
In January 2025, their bond was tested in a very different way, when the Palisades Fire destroyed the Pacific Palisades house where Lando’s family had lived for 22 years. Seymour took the Landos into her Malibu home, as Fox News and People both reported, and Lando thanked her publicly. “There are angels in this world,” he said.
Why Did The Real Romance End So Quickly?
At 90s Con, Seymour finally gave the reason the romance ended, and she gave it with good humor. According to People, she said Lando “had a plan.” She described it as “a four-child white picket fence” plan, “and a younger wife plan.”
Seymour was older than Lando and already a mother, and Parade reports she said she believed at the time that she “was never gonna be able to have [more] kids.” Then she delivered the punchline to the Hartford crowd: “But I showed him. I had twins.”
In the end, both of them got the families they wanted. Lando and Barlow raised their four children, Seymour’s twins turn 31 next month, and Seymour is now engaged to John Zambetti, who proposed on Valentine’s Day 2026.
What grew out of that short romance is a friendship that is still going strong. Fans who want to see how the whole Colorado Springs family has changed can revisit the Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman cast then and now, but Michaela and Sully themselves sound as close as ever. When the pair talked to People in June, Lando put it this way: “We’re kind of like an old married couple.” Seymour agreed. “We actually can finish one another’s sentences.”
