Colin from Accounts review — the final series is an absolute joy The Times, UK ★★★★★
‘The best TV makes you feel you are in safe hands. You approach a new run confident that the people in charge know what they are doing. And if you bet heavily that the final series of the warm-hearted Aussie romantic comedy Colin from Accounts (BBC2) will be executed with skill and feeling, head and heart, flair and fun, let’s just say that the drinks are on you. (Minor spoilers ahead.)
After two series of the trials of the medical student Ashley (Harriet Dyer) and the brewery owner Gordon (Patrick Brammall) and their two-wheeled titular terrier Colin, the final outing is a ripper whose breezy joy has not been dampened by Gordy’s ill-judged wedding proposal at the end of the last series.
We have moved on three years and they have split. Ash has a tedious boyfriend called David (Thomas Cocquerel) with a fondness for pickleball and ambitions in the trout business while Gordon has shacked up with a glacial phoney called Chelsea (Nikki Shiels). She might not be the kind of person who urinates onto a valuable coffee table while sleepwalking or who throws her own droppings out of a window when the toilet doesn’t flush, but she will never love him like Ash does.
A lesser show would pack the first few minutes with exposition, but the events of all that lost time are neatly covered off by a fantastically awkward sequence when Gordy unwittingly visits the surgery of the now-qualified Ash and is forced to fill in a medical questionnaire.
His panicked face is a picture (the acting is so good in this show) and the fact that a car crashes in the street behind him is one of many smart visual moments. It’s a reminder of its deft mixture of the surreal and silly as well as its unsentimental spine of hard yakka Aussieness. It also takes us back to the moment our pair first met: when Gordon pranged his car (and injured poor Colin) after Ash flashed her nipple at him.
It’s all so well observed, evoking the shock and pain of their sudden reunion with the excruciating presence of Ash’s intern in the consulting room. But a spark has been lit, the emotional registers playing out in the longing glances shared by Ash and Gordon as well as the looks they give their new halves when they say something particularly boring or obnoxious.
Poor David. He is someone who says “gold mind” instead of “gold mine” and he’s even allergic to dogs. Colin won’t be putting up with that. That brief, telling moment when Ash slams a car door just as he is telling her he loves her is exquisitely brutal.
One episode in, it seems clear that our lovers will get back together, but this is all about enjoying a ride packed with emotional punches, sharp dialogue and the kind of on-screen chemistry that comes when your leads are married in real life.
The ensemble characters are also so bedded in, they feel like family. They include Heavy, Gordy’s larrikin brother, who provides an effective antidote to any moment where saying the right thing is unhealthily required, as well as Gordy’s barroom colleagues Brett the gentle giant and Chiara. Her put-downs are as dry as some of the better rieslings our man keeps round the back of his bar and which, like this show, hit all the right notes.
★★★★★
Colin from Accounts: a show so fearless and hilarious that I want to get a tattoo of it. - Rhik Samadder, The Guardian
Sometimes the best things in life have the worst names. The Beatles. Smeg fridges. Nintendo Wii. But top of the tree is Colin from Accounts (Monday 7 September, 10pm, BBC Two), a name so bland I almost slipped into medical unconsciousness upon hearing it. It’s worse than bland. There’s an aspect of comedy-tie zaniness to it, a “Look, we’re calling our possibly office-based sitcom the most boring thing we can think of!” tedium. One can imagine the lazy jokes, the stock characters. Within 15 minutes of watching it, I was genuinely toying with the idea of a CFA tattoo.
How did this unpromising Australian import become my favourite? By being a showcase for fearless writing, electric chemistry and delicious comic timing. Written by real-life partners Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer, it tracks the relationship of medical student Ashley and Gordon, a brewery owner and ball cancer survivor. The romance, like their writing, is allergic to schmaltz. Their meet-cute occurs in the street when Ashley flashes a boob at Gordon, causing him to crash his car and permanently disable a stray dog that they unwillingly adopt together. (That’s Colin. It’s not really about Colin.)
If you haven’t watched the show before, you need to do that today. Right now. For Colinheads, this final series picks up three years after the cringey climax of the second, when a public declaration was badly handled. I’m impressed when shows do this – jump forward a few years between series. It shakes the snow globe, jumbling relationships and a world we’ve come to love, coating them in fresh unfamiliarity.
Thankfully, the characters are all present and incorrect. Ashley is now dating a pickleball player who works for an inner-city trout farm, and stinks. Her best friend Megan is a lesbian mumfluencer, having conceived using sperm donated from James, Ashley’s ex. Megan still has a frisson with Gordon’s colleague Chiara, the mother of three whose bisexuality she awakened. Chiara, meanwhile, is having an emotional time disclosing her recent ADHD diagnosis. “Who cares?” responds Gordon. “You’re in your 40s. It’s not like you’re in year 8 maths, distracting everybody.”
In Colin from Accounts, no one escapes satire. Ashley’s deluded mother, Lynelle, is still standing by her man – a grotesque creep called Lee who lost his job following an online sex scandal. To defend his honour, Lynelle founded anti-feminist group WAWAM (Women Against Women Against Men). Now they’re married, the group has blossomed into a men’s rights advocacy and business platform. They counsel weedy losers to step into their male energy, mostly by yelling “I’m the man of the house!” This nearly made me wet myself. There’s a backlash on the horizon though, in the form of protest group WAWAWAMEN. You work it out.
For all the brilliant ensemble clowning, it’s the love story that cements the show’s greatness. Brammall and Dyer are magnetic and tuned to each other, as the argumentative brewery boss and borderline-alcoholic graduate, now a practising GP. The first scene, which throws them together as doctor and patient in Ashley’s new surgery, sets up the question of the series: can these exes be just mates, and co-parent a dog? Given their fizzing banter, mutual attraction and the fact their every interaction could be subtitled with the word “yearning”, it seems as likely as a fruit bat and a chimpanzee co-parenting a banana.
The show is definitely more romcom than sitcom (unless the sit stands for situationship). It makes me think about the criticism most levelled at romantic comedies: that they are fantasies, with nothing to say about the ongoing pressures of actual relationships. Here is one real enough to show us ambivalence and irritation between its lovers. It runs on messiness, breakups, age difference, money imbalances, sexual exploration and fertility panics. It does so with peppery, snortingly funny gags, and all without selling out the genre’s central article of faith – that love is real, and will out. I have snot-cried to this show.
If the true test of the heart is embracing what annoys you, then Colin from Accounts is the best name for a show ever. I can’t conceive of a better one. I would be with this show if it were a worm. It’s classic and current, comforting as a quilt. I kinda wish it wasn’t back. Love hurts, but tattoos hurt more.
Colin from Accounts season 3 review – TV’s most charming romcom comes to a funny, emotional end — ★★★★ The Guardian, Luke Buckmaster
The streaming age has no shortage of will-they-won’t-they romances – the good, the bad, the cosy, the smutty, the made-for-the-algorithm. How did Colin from Accounts manage to rise above the tropes? How, in just a few years, has Patrick Brammall’s overseas profile gone from a solid but largely ignored cop comedy, to getting headhunted to woo Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada 2?
When I think of how Colin from Accounts first won me over in 2022, a moment in the first episode comes to mind. Two strangers, microbrewery owner Gordon (Brammall) and med student Ashley (Harriet Dyer) sit in a cafe, making awkward small talk as they wait for the veterinary clinic next door to tell them whether the small runaway dog they’ve accidentally maimed will pull through.
Suddenly, the barista relays sad tidings phoned in from the vet: the dog has died. Or rather, a dog has died. It soon becomes clear multiple diners are anxious pet owners killing time, and a Mexican wave of shock and grief envelopes the cafe as they try to figure out whose beloved pet carked it.
As far as meet-cutes go, it’s more of a meet-cringe. But, having just spent an awful lot of time and money in vet clinics – where the cute chaos of untrained puppies often shares a waiting room with tearful customers about to leave empty-handed – I found it perfectly relatable, and perfectly ridiculous. My partner and I laughed through tears (neither of our cats survived, FYI).
Such a tableau shows why Colin from Accounts is such a charming watch. It’s grounded in its absurdity, self-assured in its delivery, distinctly Australian but never panders to a preconceived idea of what that means. For me, its winning blend of caustic discomfort and a big heart also evokes that other great TV love story: Tim and Dawn in the original UK run of The Office.
There’s also the couple themselves. Brammall and Dyer say Gordon and Ashley aren’t entirely based on their own love story, but their raw chemistry is, without question, the show’s secret sauce. Like Australia’s elderly millennial answer to Zendaya and Tom Holland, there is something magnetic about watching these two cook on and off-screen, from the way their comic sensibilities sync as writers, to how they make that writing crackle for the camera.
This third and final season opened with a gambit: having ended the previous season on what seemed like a narrative point of no return (an ill-judged marriage proposal from Gordon, humiliatingly shot down on the spot by Ashley) the show jumped ahead three years. We find Ashley and Gordon after years of radio silence, both now in well-established new relationships. The reasons they didn’t work out the first time are still there, but then, so are the reasons they often did.
We meet their respective new partners and immediately know it isn’t going to work. It’s not because David, a handsome but hopeless trout farmer played by Thomas Cocquerel, or Nikki Shiels’ Chelsea, a corporate she-EO way past ready to move in and unfreeze her eggs for Gordon, are bad people. They’re just not right for our heroes.
Equally, this final season has taken plenty of opportunities to count the ways Ashley and Gordon aren’t always good or likable either – sometimes, not even to each other. But they are, for better or worse, each other’s kind of person. They’re good for each other. They make each other laugh.
For a show that started with a screech of car brakes and a wounded dog, Brammall and Dyer steered the finale home as if they were rolling comfortably down a familiar road. Like the standout finale of Hacks earlier this year, the showrunners knew exactly where to leave their onscreen counterparts without overstaying their welcome or over-egging the pudding (notwithstanding a Christmas theme that makes one wonder if international streaming schedules had derailed a planned December release, like the original Office finale).
For a pair brought together by a chance collision, the finale also delivered some poignant reflections on leaving your happiness to fate, or trusting your own gut. But it also wore its finality lightly, making time for scene-stealing cameos from Broden Kelly and Mark Trevorrow, a police chase, and a pretty funny handjob joke.
Without spoiling anything, they also brought us back to that fateful vet’s office. “Please calm down,” a terse receptionist reminds them. “I see a lot of highly emotional pet owners every day and I can’t remember them all.”
Watching Ashley and Gordon’s final scenes from our sofa, with our new rescue cat curled up between us, happily dozing, it was a perfect callback. Life, love and pet ownership can be a mess, but if it feels right, it feels right.
Please see more reviews here:
Four-star Sydney Morning Herald Review
Colin from Accounts final season review – farewell to a blinding ray of TV sunshine
TV BlackBox REVIEW | One more time, right in the feels — COLIN FROM ACCOUNTS season three