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.

Pluribus

1. Pluribus, as my wife pointed out two or three episodes in, is about large language models and AI chatbots. Trivially omniscient, endlessly affirming, your number-one biggest fan—yet undiscriminating about truth or beauty, and finally empty on the inside.

2. Pluribus is about collectivism, and not only its downsides but also its very real appeal to people who feel isolated, alone, and lonely.

3. Pluribus is about Covid lockdowns.

4. Pluribus is about globalism and the way that the tentacles of capitalism eventually reach everywhere and everyone. No one and nothing is untouched. “Choice” is superficially valued but ultimately weak and powerless. And the result is absolute sameness, no matter where you happen to visit while jet-setting around the world.

5. Pluribus is about asymmetrical multiculturalism: local and particular for thee but not for me. The beautiful village, with its unique language, location, song, dress, and festivity, all of it falls away the moment the young girl “chooses” to join the Others. She smiles, the songs stop at once, and everyone walks away. It was a show. It was a sham. It was a Potemkin village.

6. Pluribus is about popular art—romantasy and erotic fan fiction—versus real art, enduring art, the kind of work produced by a singular artist following her vision rather than her patrons, i.e. “fandom.”

7. Pluribus is about extremes of notional peace. Pacifism and veganism are subtly transformed by taking the unwillingness to kill to its logical conclusion: the willingness to die rather than to make another living being of any kind suffer. (Which makes the absence of birth and babies all the more telling. Will the next season reveal whether the Others are willing to procreate?)

8. Pluribus is about postlapsarian life and whether it is worth preserving if it cannot be reverted to its (actual or merely imagined) prelapsarian form. It is also, therefore, about suicide.

9. Pluribus is about the ethics and epistemology of evangelism. If you possessed the best news in the whole universe, the secret to invincible happiness, what would you be willing to do to give it to others? And if, by contrast, you thought this news was bad, not good, what would you do about it? And how could either group, insulated from the other, know who was right?

10. Pluribus is about what makes life worth living. Which means in the final accounting that Pluribus is about God.

11. Pluribus is a horror movie whose horror is entirely moral, psychological, and emotional. Nobody wants to hurt you. Nobody wants you to be unhappy. On the contrary. And just that is the essence of the horror.

12. Pluribus is a lost X-Files bottle episode, an unfilmed script for the Twilight Zone, an unwritten what-if B-movie idea from the 1970s stretched out into a multi-season prestige series. It’s anti-prestige TV.

13. Pluribus is about the worst person you know being the last person on earth. It’s Matheson’s I Am Legend, only the vampires want your soul, not your flesh. If the future of the human race came down to this woman, this maddening, selfish, ungrateful, unhappy person, could you cheer for her? Would you want her to win? What if you were her? What would it take? Is she capable of change? Are you?

14. Pluribus is about Scarface becoming Mr. Chips. It’s Vince Gilligan’s sci-fi epic about a bad woman breaking good.