More laughs in the ledger as Colin from Accounts returns

The show is full of heart without being saccharine, and quirky without being twee.

Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall with Zak the dog.

The second season of Colin from Accounts begins with an attempted kidnapping. Well, a dognapping, if we’re being pedantic.

At first, it doesn’t look that way: Ashley (Harriet Dyer) and Gordon (Patrick Brammall), now firmly a couple after the torturous will-they, won’t-they of season one, are merrily throwing a frisbee in a Sydney park, with Bill Preston’s 1974 hit Nothing From Nothing playing in the background. It all looks like innocent fun, but they’re attempting a dog heist.

Viewers of the first season will recall that Ashley and Gordon gave up their border terrier, Colin from Accounts, who has wheels for hind legs, to a yuppie couple who christened him Peppi.

Realising they made a horrendous mistake, and with negotiation attempts failing (“Possession is nine-tenths of the law”), they resort to daylight abduction.

Mastermind criminals Ashley and Gordon are not. They are ­immediately caught – despite Ashley’s best attempt to feign innocence by gobbling up the dog treats she was using to lure Colin away. A sweary, sniping altercation ensues, broken up by a well-meaning jogger who, moments later, is hit by a piano removal truck. This all happens within the first two minutes. Welcome to Colin from Accounts.

The offbeat, extraordinarily loveable Binge original series ­premiered in 2022 with little ­advanced hype. But from the ­moment Ashley flashed her boob at Gordon and inadvertently caused him to run over Colin, it captured hearts across Australia and, later, the world. Colin from Accounts now has a devoted following in more than 100 territories, including the UK and US.

Created and written by its leads, real-life married couple Dyer and Brammall, the show is full of heart without being saccharine, and quirky without being twee. It’s at its very best when it uses droll humour to explore the difficult, embarrassing, and ­occasionally tragic parts of life.

It’s a comedy, but not one where the gags fly at you a mile-a-minute. A relief, actually. There are too many Australian television shows that are all too desperate to make you laugh. Instead, the humour in Colin from Accounts feels mined from the conversational zingers we hear in real-life.

There’s a great scene in the third episode where Ashley, Gordon, and his slacker brother, Justin Rosniak’s Heavy (a nickname that’s origins are too good to spoil), are sitting in the backyard, drinking beer, and talking about body counts.

Ashley has found Gordon’s stash of one-off beers that he has named after past lovers in his ­closet (Kiara’s Cans, Melanie’s Melons IPA), and it doesn’t sit right with her.

“Bit off, isn’t it?” she says.

He tries to justify keeping the mementos: “Should Leonard Cohen have deleted So Long Marianne when he started seeing Suzanne?” she retorts mockingly, “You’re not Leon-ard Co-hen, Gord-on.” Who hasn’t had an ­argument like this?

Season two doesn’t feel like a new chapter. Kicking off a fortnight after the debut season wrapped up, nothing has really changed in Ashley and Gordon’s world, but it’s a pleasure to be back in their company.