A look, a flash and a crash start “Colin From Accounts” off on the wrong foot. An attractive woman walking and an attractive man in her car catch her eye and, when she crosses in front of him, she brazenly flashes one breast. He is so distracted that he then hits a dog. (Spoiler alert: the dog will be fine.) It may not seem like it from the description, but as these three rather lost individuals cross paths, the series delivers comedy and dysfunctional romance with a sure hand.
The two human characters, Ashley and Gordon, are played by the show's married creators and executive producers, Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall. “Colin From Accounts” (as the characters call the dog) takes place in Australia, where they come from; The Australian-American co-production is streaming here on Paramount+.
The couple moved to Los Angeles several years ago because Brammall was adapting his improvised Australian series “No Activity” for CBS All Access. “To be honest, I don't think the script would have been written if we had never moved, because it was actually born when I was sitting here bored, not used to not working,” says Dyer, as she and Brammall sit in a restaurant in The Angels. Happy coffee with his dog Walter.
“I had only been here a month and Patty told me, 'You're going crazy, go write something,'” he recalls. “I have a bit of a sordid mind. “I try to look a little for the most vulnerable part of life.”
Brammall agrees. “She is hers.”
“I'm suspicious of people,” he explains. “It's not macabre, but I feel like everyone is a sexual deviant. I was interested in what happens if men see women or women see men, there's attraction and there's an accident, and then you can't hide the fact that you're just an animal.”
He wrote the pilot in four days. “Isn't that annoying?” Brammall says. “I was busy writing something inferior.”
Says Dyer: “I kept thinking that it was something magical and that if I didn't get it out and do it right, it was going to disappear.”
Brammall: “She was hitting the keys and was all sweaty and feverish.”
Dyer: “I would consume too much caffeine too.”
Harriet Dyer wrote the pilot for “Colin From Accounts” in four days. “Isn't that annoying?” says her husband Patrick Brammall. “He was busy writing something inferior.”
(Lisa Tomasetti/Lisa Tomasetti/Paramount+)
Dyer insists it was purely a writing exercise. “He had so little faith in myself and it, that he wasn't even married enough to play the part. I think that's why I wrote so many crazy things for Ashley to do” (the flash is just the beginning) “because I thought (a) I'll never do this and (b) no one will ever do this.” Until his producer got hold of him.
The couple wrote the rest of the scripts but not together. After plotting the stories of medical student Ashley, brewery owner Gordon, her friends and family, and Colin, they split up the episodes and wrote them separately, swapping them back and forth. “If we were there to try to do it together, we wouldn't write anything,” Brammall says. Dyer adds: “And we drove each other crazy. We work differently; Patty is more contemplative. She just has more confidence, so if I had been there and we had literally shared a laptop, we would have killed each other.”
During production on Season 1 in Australia, Brammall says, “I remember at the end of every week of filming we were like, 'Can you believe we have to do this?' Plus, at the time we were still dodging COVID,” with his young daughter in tow.
They credit their production company for giving them the space to do exactly what they envisioned without worrying about what anyone else thought. “My big fear was that people would think I was cute,” Dyer says.
Now that job offers are coming in, the Australian couple wants to take it easy. “We just need to navel-gaze for a minute and figure out what's next,” says Harriet Dyer, with her husband Patrick Brammal.
(Yuri Hasegawal / for The Times)
Brammall intervenes. “Yes, Harri was allergic to the idea of performing as a doggy style show.”
Dyer: “Doggy style?”
Brammall: “Harri is allergic to doggy style.”
Dyer: “I was allergic to making a show that looked like a dog.”
Brammall: “The dog's style. Print this.”
Dyer says, “Stop saying style in the same sentence as dog. I didn't want it to be that. “I didn’t want it to be crazy.”
Brammall: “It's a small miracle that anything of quality is ever made, and after everything you do and all the amazing people who collaborate with us, we didn't want people to say, 'Hey, okay.'”
Dyer: “That was my terror. I'd rather someone say, “I really didn't like that show” than be ambivalent. So he was nervous.”
His instincts paid off; the series has a 100% fresh critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. They have just completed work on season 2 in Sydney.
“Last night we went on a date for the first time in six months,” Brammall says. Dyer adds: “We have to take care of the union, because our daughter is trying to destroy it.”
Brammall says: “That's your job.”
Now they're getting requests to be showrunners on other projects, “and that's so amazing I'm pinching myself,” Dyer says. But they will have to feel as convinced about any new project as they do about “Colin” to say yes. In the meantime, they need a break. “We're very happy that this little accident of a TV show worked well and people want to work with us, but we just have to stare at ourselves for a minute and figure out what's next,” he says. “Also, we want to do a season 3, because the way we left season 2, people will be angry.”
Brammall adds: “Yes, I hope the commissioning network comes on board. But we just need to refill the tanks. “This is how we protect ourselves.”
