My Video call with the creators and stars of the successful Australian sitcom Colin from AccountIt feels like a sitcom. Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer are at home in Los Angeles, where their little Joni has skipped her nap today of all days. At first I can only speak to Brammall, then only to Dyer, then a bit to both of them. Then Joni joins us just long enough to accidentally end the conversation. When it resumes, the camera is no longer working. It’s a happy mess. The now invisible Dyer says she was on bathroom duty when the interview began. “I couldn’t stop laughing. It felt really on-brand.”
It’s that kind of show. Colin from Accounting follows the development of an unlikely relationship between medical student Ashley Mulden (Dyer) and Gen X microbrewery owner Gordon Crapp (Brammall) after they accidentally injure a dog and are left to care for it. In an unforgettable early scene, Ashley struggles with a toilet in Gordon’s house that won’t flush, with unpleasant consequences. When a foreign broadcaster wanted to cut the whole sequence out to make room for commercial breaks, the pair collectively prevailed. “We said – and this is anathema in Hollywood – that we might not do this sale,” says Brammall. “It sounds like it’s not for them.” No toilet joke, no deal.
“It’s just not a TV show,” Dyer explains. “I don’t even know what they were going to do with a lot of fucking and the odd C-word.”
As writers, stars and editors, they are fiercely protective. One point of contention at the beginning was the deliberately unattractive title. Although they are separated by age, lifestyle and temperament (Brammall is more than 12 years older than Dyer), Ashley and Gordon grow closer through the banter that leads to the dog’s ridiculous name, which comes from a pet Dyer and Brammall used to own. If you think Colin from Accounting is a funny name for a dog, then you’re on the show’s wavelength. If not, you might want to move on. “It grabs you,” says Dyer, who had to do some convincing herself. “People either hate it or love it. That’s better than nothing.”
Love won, beyond all expectations. The show was an award-winning word-of-mouth phenomenon on Australian streaming service Binge in December 2022, wowed the UK the following spring and made it to the US in November, where it ran for a year and received much praise. Given the acknowledged influence of Girl And Flea bagthey are still speechless that fans of their little show include Lena Dunham and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. “To hear that Lena and Phoebe loved it meant everything to me as a writer and creator,” says Dyer. “They are the cornerstone.”
“I thought, oh God, I wish there were men who said that,” sighs Brammall. (He’s kidding: Richard Curtis, David Tennant and Andrew Scott are also admirers.)
The global success is doubly sweet because they were advised to iron out the Australian slang for an international audience. “I said no, we’ll just keep it super Australian and if people need to Google words or rewind or turn on their subtitles then they can do that,” says Dyer, paraphrasing something she heard Derry Girl Creator Lisa McGee said at last year’s Bafta Awards: “There’s a whole universe in the specific.”
The high-wire tone is everything. Wikipedia calls Colin from Accounting a dramedy, which usually means a half-hour show that isn’t very funny. The creators prefer to think of it as a romantic comedy that happens to be about cancer, infertility, fear and death, but never at the expense of laughs. “We have the dark shit right next to the funny stuff,” says Brammall. Sitcom grotesqueries like Darren Gilshenan’s mesmerizingly creepy Professor Lee coexist with scenes that feel like real life. Tenderness mixes with scatology. The dialogue bubbles like champagne. Ultimately, these are characters you want to hang out with, whatever they’re doing.
For the second season – their “difficult second album” – the couple wanted to go one step further: there is an extraordinary bottle episode featuring Gordon’s reactionary family and another that recalls Martin Scorsese’s nightmare farce. After workBut they were determined not to let their transformation from underdog to frontrunner deter them. The only celebrity guest appearance is a brief cameo by Kevin Bacon. “We had more of him,” says Brammall, “but we decided it would be more fun to have Kevin Bacon for eight seconds – like, what the heck? It was wonderful of him to do that.” In general, they prefer to employ their friends. “There’s a lot of nepotism,” laughs Dyer. “We just want to give our mates jobs. We know how it is in Australia. There’s not a ton of work.”
It’s ironic that they moved to LA to work as actors shortly after they met in 2015 and now spend half the year at home filming. In LA, they say, they are anonymous, but in Australia they are newly minted celebrities. “Australians are great,” says Brammall. “They say, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, I love your work,’ and then they’re gone.” Due to Australia’s strict biosecurity laws and a missed deadline, they had to leave their dog Wally behind during filming of the second season. “The great dichotomy of Colin from Accounting is that we’re leaving our dog in America for six months to make a TV show about people who love their dogs,” Dyer says with a guilty laugh. “That’s really rude.”
While they wait for the series to be renewed, the pair are writing a still-secret movie script together, which wasn’t quite their plan. “We thought the byproduct would be great acting jobs, but that backfired a little bit because people want us to write for them,” says Dyer. “People ask: How can we capture that voice? But we don’t want to do another romantic comedy. We don’t want to keep teasing out our chemistry, because it’s a real living plant and you have to nurture it.”
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Talking to Brammall and Dyer – or Patty and Harri, as they call each other – is like meeting Gordon and Ashley a few years later, only much nicer and wiser. They have a quick, easy chemistry, playing anecdote ping-pong and firing off jokes at a mad pace. Many takes have been ruined by their desire to make each other laugh. When Brammall gets up to check on Joni, he shouts back: “I’m out of the room, so you can say what’s bugging you about me.” Dyer laughs sweetly: “Nothing, to be honest.”
They are, however, very different social creatures. “I really struggle,” says Dyer. “I’m good at switching it on so that nobody notices, but my social battery runs out quickly. Paddy is an extrovert. He’s a man with no fear. And I… I’m just working on it, you know? But I have to remember that this is all actually brilliant. It’s fleeting. People might not give a damn about me and our silly creations in a year, so why not just try and enjoy it?”
Nevertheless, she is annoyed by the gender double standards in public appearances. “I hate it! I hate having to do hair and makeup for two hours and he has to do it for 15 minutes. I hate that I have to wear high heels. I feel like I’m only 10 degrees away from storming down a red carpet in sneakers.”
“I’m annoyed that I’m not treated like a piece of meat,” says Brammall with a serious expression and returns to the couch. “I have a body. Let’s look at My Body. I wants to be objectified!”
The warmth in their relationship is so inimitable that I wonder whether working together as husband and wife also has disadvantages.
“That’s too much time to spend with anyone, let alone your partner,” Brammall admits. “We’re on each others’ heels for a year, so we need to make sure we spend time apart. Rediscover ourselves.”
“It’s a bit like Stockholm syndrome,” says Dyer. “He goes for walks and I miss him. I’ll be honest, we had a mega fight every season. It cleans the pipes – gets the dirt out.”
The funny thing, she says, is that they leave their real lives behind when they act together. “When the camera is rolling, I don’t feel like we are us. There’s this beautiful time between ‘Action!’ and ‘Cut!’ where I’m not Harriet, he’s not my husband, we don’t have a toddler, we don’t have a dog on the other side of the world, we don’t have a mortgage. We are Ashley and Gordon. And we are at the beginning of everything.”
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