In Paramount+’s imported Australian romantic comedy series Colin from Accounts, the star-crossed lead couple Ashley and Gordon’s meet-cute starts saucy but ends not-so-cute when, spotting him behind the wheel and liking what she sees, she impulsively flashes her nipple; distracted, he accidentally hits a dog, the titular Colin.
And as stars, co-creators and off-screen married couple Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall recounted it at Deadline’s Contenders TV panel, the inspiration for the series sprang from a somewhat similar real-life mishap.
“There was a small moment that happened when I was a nanny,” recalled Dwyer. “I was pushing someone else’s child in a stroller and a man took his shirt off and I pushed the stroller into a lamppost. And I thought, ‘Oh shit – this must happen all the time.’ And I was kind of engaged with the idea of what happens when kind of attraction sparks and a small accident occurs…Especially if something happens, you’ve got to deal with it, like the dog. Then you’ve got something that two people who don’t have anything except chemistry, they have to deal with it. And that felt interesting to us.”
“It sort of flowed from that: these two people have got to deal with this problem,” added Bramwell, noting that the as-yet-unconnected couple are thrown together as they seek medical treatment for the injured Colin. “She’s desperate for him not to be put down, but she doesn’t have any money. She’s a medical student. I have money, but I’m indifferent about the dog. But she just showed me a nipple.”
“And he wants to see the other one,” Dyer interjected.
“And the other one might be worth $12,000,” said Bramwell. “So there’s a show.”
Because they frequently work and reside in the United States, the couple said they had an opportunity to craft the show for the U.S. with American actors out of the gate, but opted instead to set and produce in their homeland so they could lean into their most authentic vision.
“In terms of writing the scripts, we just have all these Australian voices in our heads, and we thought the best scripts are going to be in our voices and hopefully everyone will understand what we’re saying,” said Dyer.
“It’s not strong on story, this show – it’s a relationship comedy; it’s a romantic comedy, so the tone is so important,” added Bramwell. “We knew that we could deliver the tone that we understood if we did it in our own voices.”
“And in our own bodies,” said Dyer.
“And faces, which we ultimately did use,” said Bramwell. “And so we hoped that the more authentic we could be to the stuff we understood, the greater the appeal it would be. And it’s borne that out. It’s gone to a lot of different countries and it’s here and it’s in the UK and that sort of stuff. So we are really happy and I think people are responding to it because it does feel like our voice.”
“We probably would’ve made a lot more money if we’d made it here,” quipped Dyer.
As a couple, their work on the series is, they said, uniquely harmonious. “Probably the healthiest and most respectful part of our relationship is easily us as writers, and then us as actors and producers,” said Dyer. “And then as parents, husband and wife, we’re just ‘Get out of my sight!’”
They also revealed that there’s no adorable origin story behind their relationship. “No, we just met like normal people,” said Dyer.
“Yeah. No dogs, no nipples,” said Bramwell. “That all came later.”