My video call with the creators and stars of hit Australian sitcom Colin from Accounts feels rather like a sitcom in itself. Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer are at home in Los Angeles, where their toddler Joni has chosen today, of all days, to drop her regular lunchtime nap. At first I can talk to only Brammall, then only Dyer, then both for bit. Then Joni joins us just long enough to inadvertently terminate the call. When it resumes, the camera isn’t working any more. It is merry chaos. The now-invisible Dyer says that when the interview began she was on potty duty. “I couldn’t stop laughing. It felt really on-brand.”
It’s that kind of show. Colin from Accounts follows the blossoming of an unlikely relationship between millennial medical student Ashley Mulden (Dyer) and gen X microbrewery owner Gordon Crapp (Brammall) after they are accidentally complicit in injuring a dog and have to take care of it. In one indelible early set piece, Ashley wrestles with an unflushable toilet in Gordon’s house, with unsavoury consequences. When a foreign broadcaster wanted to cut the whole sequence to make room for ad breaks, the couple put their collective foot down. “We said – and this is anathema in Hollywood – maybe let’s not make this sale,” says Brammall. “It sounds like it’s not for them.” No toilet gag, no deal.
“It’s just not a broadcast show,” reasons Dyer. “I don’t even know what they were going to do with a load of fucks and the odd C-word.”
As writers, stars and editors, they are very protective. One bone of contention early on was the wilfully unappealing title. Separated by age, lifestyle and temperament (Brammall is more than 12 years older than Dyer), Ashley and Gordon first bond through the banter that leads to the dog’s ridiculous name, taken from a pet that Dyer and Brammall used to own. If you agree that Colin from Accounts is a funny name for a dog, then you’re on the show’s wavelength. If not, maybe move on. “It grabs you,” says Dyer, who took some convincing herself. “People either hate it or love it. That’s better than nothing.”
Love prevailed, beyond all their expectations. The show was an award-winning word-of-mouth phenomenon on the Australian streaming service Binge in December 2022, delighted the UK the following spring, and made it to the US in November, producing one long year of plaudits. Given the acknowledged influence of Girls and Fleabag, they are still gobsmacked that their little show’s fans include Lena Dunham and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. “To hear that Lena and Phoebe loved it meant everything to me as a female writer and creator,” says Dyer. “They’re the cornerstone.”
“I thought, oh God, I wish there were men saying that,” sighs Brammall. (He’s joking: Richard Curtis, David Tennant and Andrew Scott are also admirers.)
Global success is doubly sweet because they had been advised to iron out the Australian slang for an international audience. “I said no, we’ll just keep it super Australian and if people have to Google words or rewind or put on their subtitles, then they can,” says Dyer. She paraphrases something she heard Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee say at last year’s Bafta awards: “There’s a whole universe in the specific.”
The high-wire tone is everything. Wikipedia calls Colin from Accounts a dramedy, which usually denotes a half-hour show that isn’t very funny. The creators prefer to see it as a romcom that happens to include cancer, infertility, anxiety and death, but never at the expense of laughs. “We have the dark shit right next to the funny stuff,” says Brammall. Sitcom grotesques like Darren Gilshenan’s mesmerisingly creepy Professor Lee coexist with scenes that feel like real life. Tenderness mingles with scatology. The dialogue bubbles like champagne. Ultimately, these are characters you want to hang out with, whatever they’re doing.
For season two – their “difficult second album” – the couple wanted to push things further: there’s an extraordinary bottle episode with Gordon’s reactionary family and another one reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s nightmare farce After Hours. But they were determined not to be swayed by their transformation from underdogs to top dogs. The only celebrity guest spot is a lightning cameo by Kevin Bacon. “We had some more of him,” says Brammall, “but we decided it’s more fun to have Kevin Bacon just for eight seconds – like, what the fuck? It was wonderful of him to do it.” Generally, they would rather hire their friends. “There’s a great deal of nepotism,” laughs Dyer. “We just want to give our mates jobs. We know what it’s like in Australia. There’s not heaps of work.”
It’s ironic that they moved to LA to find acting work not long after getting together in 2015 and now spend half the year filming back home. In LA, they say, they are anonymous, but in Australia they are newly minted celebrities. “Australians are great,” says Brammall. “They’ll say, ‘sorry, sorry, sorry, 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 while filming season two. “The great dichotomy of Colin from Accounts is we’ll leave our dog for six months in America to go and make a TV show about people who love their dog,” says Dyer, with a guilty laugh. “It’s really rude.”
While they wait for the show to be renewed, the couple are co-writing an under-wraps movie screenplay, which wasn’t quite the plan. “We thought the by-product would be awesome acting jobs, but it’s backfired a little because people want us to write for them,” says Dyer. “People are like: how can we grab that voice? But we don’t want to make another romcom. We don’t want to keep wheeling out our chemistry because it’s a real living plant and you’ve got to nourish 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 down the line, only much nicer and wiser. They have a quick, easy chemistry, playing anecdote ping-pong and firing off jokes at screwball speed. 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 annoys you about me.” Dyer laughs sweetly: “Nothing, to be honest.”
They are, however, very different social animals. “I really struggle,” says Dyer. “I’m good at turning it on so no one would know, but my social battery life goes down quickly. Paddy is an extrovert. He’s a man with zero anxiety. And I … I’m just working on it, y’know? But what I have to remember is it’s all actually brilliant. It’s fleeting. People might not give a shit about me and our silly creations in a year’s time, so why not just try to enjoy it?”
Still, the gendered double-standards for public appearances bugs her. “I hate that! I hate being in hair and makeup for two hours and he’s in it for 15 minutes. I hate that I have to wear high heels. I feel like I’m 10 degrees away from just rocking on to a red carpet in sneakers.”
“I resent not being treated like a piece of meat,” deadpans Brammall, returning to the couch. “I have a body. Let’s look at my body. I want to be objectified!”
There is such unfakeable warmth to their rapport that I wonder if there are any downsides to working together as husband and wife.
“It’s too much time to spend with anybody, let alone your partner,” admits Brammall. “For a year we’re in each other’s pockets constantly, so then we have to take care to spend time apart. Rediscover ourselves.”
“It’s a bit Stockholm syndrome,” says Dyer. “He goes for a walk and I miss him. I will say candidly that each season we’ve had one mega-fight. It cleans the pipes – gets the gunk out.”
The funny thing is, she says, that when they are acting together, they leave their real lives behind. “When the camera’s rolling, I don’t feel like it’s us. There’s this beautiful time between ‘Action! and ‘Cut!’ when 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’re Ashley and Gordon. And we’re at the start of things.”