Colin From Accounts’ (unwitting?) heteropessimism
Colin From Accounts is clever, funny, and well-written. It’s a cross-generational TV rom-com for the post-pandemic era—and it’s written, filmed, and set in Australia, to boot.
It’s also not afraid to be nasty. It stares straight into the abyss that is the dating scene of twentysomethings in the age of the smartphone and refuses to flinch. It depicts the relationships there in all their shallowness, exhaustion, and brutality.
Given that its stars double as its creators, the show also can’t help but fall in love with its leads and their chemistry. It wants us to want them to make good on their uncute meet-cute and to end up together, forever—even in spite of all their problems, as individuals and as a couple.
Here’s the thing, though. The female lead, Ash, played by Harriet Dyer, is a three-dimensional mess, and therefore both lovable and redeemable. She’s an adult, trying to grow up. You cheer for her both in spite of and in light of her shortcomings.
The same isn’t true for the male lead, Gordon, played by Patrick Brammall. Gordon is awful. He is a porn-watching, online-gambling, over-indebted, always-drinking, easily enraged longtime philanderer and stereotypical man-child. He half-heartedly apologizes for some of this, but not for all of it. The most he can do about his porn habits is explain that it’s an old habit he’ll never kick. Ash just has to accept it. Which she does.
As I watch this show, even with admiration and affection for the creators and the characters alike, I find myself rooting for Ash to leave Gordon behind. If my thirty-year-old daughter brought home Gordon I would be distraught. I would think I had failed as a father. I would think all my worst fears had come to pass.
Colin From Accounts is, like Obsession, a work of heteropessimism. Only it’s a romantic comedy, and I don’t know—yet—whether the writers understand what they have made.
I’ve not seen the third and final season, which became available in the US today. Either the show will reveal that it’s always known what it was all along. Or it will prove far more depressing than Ash and Gordon breaking up: it will, that is to say, find a way to force this relationship to happen, by holding up Gordon as the best a woman can do in 2026. And that would make for a real horror show indeed.
