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It began, as all great romances do, with a nipple flash. When Colin from Accounts, the little comedy that could, started airing back in 2022, the world fell in love – hard and fast. It was a surprisingly prickly Australian show about Ashley, a student doctor (Harriet Dyer), and Gordon, an older, brewery owner (Patrick Brammall), who fall in love after she pops a boob at him, he hits a dog with his car, and they jointly land an astronomical vet bill and a new pet.
The show shared its name with its furriest star – full name: “Colin from accounts payable, who is working on the big merger” – and it was as charming as the title suggested, winning fans across Hollywood and the world. That Brammall and Dyer were actually a couple, now married with two kids and a dog (no wheels), just made everyone love the show even more.
But Colin from Accounts is now ending with its third season – which some may feel is premature, but undeniably confident. “We don’t want to flog a dead horse,” Brammall says. “It definitely feels right.”
As Dyer adds: “It is not that the horse is dead yet – we don’t even want to find it is having trouble breathing.”
Wrapping their show, which they both also write, has yet to fully sink in for Brammall. “I don’t think it’s hit me, honestly,” he says. “There was lots of mini moments – ‘Oh shit it’s the last time I’m gonna do this, it’s the last time I’m gonna do that’.” Dyer, meanwhile, has had three “big old cries”: “The last one was when I was in the editing suite and I just looked around at the little grey room and it came out like vomit.”
Season one of Colin was a will-they-won’t-they story. Season two said well-they-have-but-should-they? Season three asks could they again? The new episodes open three years after Gordon made an excruciating marriage proposal to Ashley at a friend’s wedding: Ashley and Gordon have since split up and are dating other people, but are reunited when Gordon unwittingly makes a doctor’s appointment at Ashley’s work.
A married couple with a hell of a lot of chemistry playing exes is fun to watch. “And it is fun to play,” says Brammall. “Obviously, we love playing the stuff where we’re falling in love, but we love having big arguments just as much. We’re actors by trade, so we love pretendies. I had a ball. I think Harri did too.”
Season three has “a slight forlorn quality and an awkwardness – it’s almost like taking them back to the start”, adds Dyer. “All tension is good, I think. Yearning. It’s very easy to play that, especially with someone that you know so well.”
Splitting Ashley and Gordon up just seemed like a fun, creative road to go down; the three-year time leap, meanwhile, was practical. “I’m almost 38 and Ash was 30 in the second season – we had to catch up a little bit!” Dyer laughs.
The couple have previously said that they have one big fight each season. What was it over this time?
“Golly gosh, I think we didn’t have one,” Dyer says. “We’ve been having to get very economical with our energy.”
Brammall laughs. “The last two seasons we’ve had one kid. This time we had two and it’s like, who’s got time? Who’s got the luxury of having a big fight?”
“Those days are over,” Dyer adds. “Now it’s like, how do I say this in the least offensive way so we can make this butter cheese pasta and put the girls to bed?”
It is rare that an Australian show set in Sydney would be completely devoid of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House shots the world expects. This wasn’t a conscious decision; Gordon owns a microbrewery, so Brammall and Dyer made him work in a part of Sydney populated by them: the inner west. But the result has meant international viewers have got a glimpse of a city that doesn’t feel too far from their own, bar the magpie song and gum trees.
“In episode five of this season we go to a beach, but that’s probably the first grain of sand in all the episodes of Colin. Which, yeah, as a Sydney show feels almost blasphemous,” Dyer says. “People haven’t seen that side of Sydney, which makes it interesting. Something about terraces and warehouses – it didn’t feel quintessentially Sydney, which gives it a universality.”
“We don’t need to sell Sydney to the world, we don’t need to sell Australia to the world,” Brammall adds. He remembers an early attempt to market Colin as “a new Australian comedy”, to which Dyer responded: “Don’t say Australian comedy. It’s a new comedy.”
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“Why are we so quick to brand it as Australian?” Brammall says. “How about we’re world class and we don’t have to do that? Let’s tell the story we want to tell and the Sydney of it, the Australia of it, can follow.”
There are enough local references in there for the home crowd – the band T-shirts, the soundtrack, the occasional “cunt” dropped by a nana. But they once did get a note from an American executive about using the word “arvo”: “They said, you should make that ‘afternoon’ so people in America know what we’re talking about. And we were like … no. It stayed in.”
Part of Colin’s appeal comes from the palpable sense that every argument, every calamity, every embarrassment, has actually happened to someone in the show. A version of the poo incident in the very first episode happened to Dyer; the jibes about Gordon and Ashley’s age gap ring true too (Brammall is 50, Dyer is 37; a fan once mistook him for her father).
Even Gordon hitting Colin with his car after being distracted by Ashley’s boob flash: Dyer once walked a pram into a pole after seeing a hot guy. “It wasn’t my baby,” Dyer says, as Brammall laughs. “I wasn’t a very good babysitter. The baby was fine.”
There are also the more serious moments, like Gordon’s fertility problems after surviving testicular cancer, which Brammall thinks was an unconscious link to his own infertility, caused by childhood illness. (Brammall and Dyer have two adopted daughters, Joni and Mabel.) “It’s not until you read it later that you go ‘Oh I see that connects to something in my life’,” he says. “These little truthful thoughts or feelings or ideas or experiences can float through and generally, if it’s funny or if it feels real, then it’s in the show.”
“We touch on taboo subjects that you sometimes wouldn’t dare touch. But we touch them kind of gently,” Dyer says.
“And always with warmth,” Brammall adds. “We do the light and the dark thing – get people laughing and then punch them with something really heavy.”
“It’s not all gold, but Pat and I are always trying to make it the best it can be,” Dyer says. (Brammall: “Oh fuck yeah.”) “We don’t think that we are authorities on anything.” (Brammall: “Oh fuck no.”) “We’re nervous today because we still care so much about whether people like it.”
People already love Colin From Accounts, including famous fans Nick Offerman, Lena Dunham, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Richard Curtis and Anne Hathaway; Brammall recently played the latter’s boyfriend in The Devil Wears Prada 2. From such great heights, what does success look like for Brammall and Dyer now? Dyer answers instantly: “balance”.
“Because the hours of this life are so demanding – it’s not really designed for a married couple to leave and come home at the same time when you’ve got little people looking for you,” she says. “To me, success looks like balance and finish reading my book. But we’re definitely going to work together again because I wouldn’t want to write with anybody else.”
“That’s going to be an amazing life,” Brammall says.
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The first two episodes of Colin from Accounts season 3 are available to stream on Binge in Australia now, with new episodes streaming weekly. UK and US airdates are yet to be announced.
