Weeks after their January 2020 dinner in Los Angeles, McEntire’s mother, Jacqueline, passed away in March just as pandemic travel shutdowns separated the pair across state lines. With Linn in California and McEntire quarantining in Oklahoma, they built their relationship over daily morning phone and FaceTime calls they called “Coffee Camp,” talking for hours before they could reunite in person that summer.
Over the next four years, that daily companionship carried over into their screen work. Having both navigated decades in the industry—including McEntire’s divorces from Charlie Battles in 1987 and Narvel Blackstock in 2015, and Linn’s ended engagement in 2010—they found an easy rhythm working side by side on camera.
In the fall of 2022, they played married backcountry outfitters Sunny and Buck Barnes during the third season of the ABC drama *Big Sky: Deadly Trails*. A few months later, in January 2023, they shared the screen again in the Lifetime television movie *The Hammer*, with McEntire starring as a circuit judge in Nevada and Linn playing a mysterious cowboy.