We only spent 95 minutes with Harry Burns and Sally Albright. A mere 93 minutes with Alvy Singer and Annie Hall. And just 91 minutes with Harold Chasen and Maude Chardin.
Great romantic comedies make us fall for the protagonists quickly. They arrive fully formed, characters with quirks and preferences and histories and longings. This week, Australian TV show Colin from Accounts returns for its third and final season – a run that feels both fleeting and fulfilled.
When we left Gordon (Patrick Brammall) and Ash (Harriet Dyer), they were on the dancefloor at a friend’s wedding, with Gordon down on one knee. Three years have passed: Ash moved to a hospital in Warrnambool and met fisherman David (Thomas Cocoquerel) while Gordon stayed in Sydney with their dog Colin, blew through his savings and ended up with corporate lawyer Chelsea (Nikki Shiels). A chance encounter – Gordon becomes Ash’s patient – brings them back into each other’s orbits.
That’s the question that these final episodes unravel. Can Gordon and Ash – whose worlds first collided when they caused the car crash that injured Colin – make it work? The chemistry between Brammall and Dyer – who co-created the show and are married – means that audiences will always be rooting for Gordon and Ash, even while they spiral into self-destructive recklessness.
He is a paragon of authenticity, the owner of a craft brewery who is refusing to sell out (though gambling debts may force his hand), while she is a screwball dynamo, the sort of doctor who rolls her eyes at hypochondriac patients. They are not outsiders; the show encourages the idea that they are attractive and eligible. And yet they are both terminally immature (“I want to have kids at some point!” Gordon, a man in his late-forties, whines) and selfish.
The differences in their age (Ash is in her early thirties) and station are mitigated by a shared worldview. This third season flips the script, converting their odd-couple, on-off relationship into something that feels inevitable, gravitational. In order to sand the edges off their adultery, the writing makes David and Chelsea monstrously unappealing (a romcom trope, sure, but one that feels a bit beneath the show).
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