Season three of 'Colin from Accounts' will play games with time

If there’s going to be a season three of “Colin from Accounts,” look for a time jump.

Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall, stars and creators of the comedy, say the shift would give them a chance to catch up with the gaps that occurred between the first two seasons.

In that time: the married couple had a daughter, dealt with the selling of the series and had to consider the toll “Colin” was taking on their lives.

“Once we started shooting season two, our daughter stopped sleeping through the night,” Brammall explains. “And the bags under my eyes were like….” He pauses.

“I had to pull the gaffer aside and I was like, ‘I don’t want to embarrass Patty, but we really need to lighten him up…do some freshening,’” Dyer says.

In that hoped-for season three, the Australians will be older and dealing with the cliffhanger they dropped at the end of season two: an unanswered proposal.

While signs point to a third season (or even more), Brammall says “Colin” isn’t crafted like an American sitcom. “We’re almost thinking of each season as an act,” he says. “Whether it’s a three-act or a five-act we’re not sure, but it feels like these beats in a relationship.”

When she was on “American Auto,” Dyer got a chance to see how American series were crafted. It was quite different from what the Brammalls have created.

“There’s so many more kind of hard jokes and no air,” she says of the American template. “You go to a table read and it’ll be maybe 39 pages and that has to get down to 22 and a half minutes. So every scene you feel like you’re auditioning it and about a third is lost. You’ve got to really just talk very quickly to hit it all, whereas ‘Colin’ is so backbeat.” Story may spread throughout a season. A joke made in one episode could be referenced two or three later.

“Colin,” too, is a bit more profane than American series. “That’s how we speak,” Brammall says. “It feels authentic…there’s a sense of taking the piss and the mickey out of each other.”

When Dyer and Brammall were pitching “Colin” to producers, they realized there weren’t Australian rom-coms. There were comedies, but none like the one they were proposing. “We Googled it and we’re like, ‘Where are the Australian rom-coms?’” Dyer says. “What would be an idea for two people meeting (over) a shared problem?”

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That’s where Colin – a dog he hits while watching her flash him – enters in.

“A lot of it kind of unfurled from that,” Dyer says.

What the two discovered was they could drive a wedge between the characters, but they couldn’t make it so big they couldn’t recover. They toyed with the idea of finding the dog’s owner and where their relationship might wind up. An age difference between the two provided fodder and, soon, they were opening new doors. “We no longer had the safety of the rom-com structure,” Brammall says. “We kind of reverse engineered it in a way we never used it to a ‘meet cute.’ It opened up all funny stuff.”

Creepy relatives, needy friends, wearying workplaces combined to give the two big moments. And Colin? He’s a go-to whenever needed. “He’s very smart,” Dyer says. “He’s almost like, not very dog-like on the set.”

Conflict, the two say, work for their characters. “Tension is funny, right?” Dyer asks. “If they’re doing good, everything’s fine, no one’s laughing. You need enough tension to have issues which are funny and sticky and awkward.”

Because they write the show together, Brammall and Dyer are rarely apart. “The balance is way off,” Brammall says. “It does force you to make it work. In forcing those doors open, you do find more space.”

They may spend, as she says, “26 hours a day” together, but they allow for time for their daughter “and we watch TV together.”

“Colin from Accounts” works, Brammall says, because “it’s very connected. We are all silly, we are all just a couple of minutes away from potential tragedy and we’ve got to dissipate the anxiety about it.”

The first and second seasons of “Colin from Accounts” are now streaming on Paramount+.

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