‘Colin From Accounts’ Creators on Scrapped Season 2 Ideas, Which Scene Made Harriet Dyer Break and a Season 3: “We’ve Kind of Forced Their Hand”

[This story contains spoilers from Colin From Accounts season two’s finale.]

Watching Paramount+‘s Colin From Accounts, you might think a certain scene just can’t be real. That it’s too awkward to be a real thing that happened.

But most of the show’s moments derive from friends and family members of creators, showrunners and stars Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall, who are also married in real life.

“Oftentimes you can’t make this shit up,” Brammall tells The Hollywood Reporter when talking about the second season of the critically acclaimed comedy show. “Like, humans are very strange, contrary creatures.”

Season two, which dropped all episodes on Paramount+ on Thursday, continues to follow Ashley (Dyer) and Gordon (Brammall) in their relationship after they were somewhat forced together in season one after they both looked after a dog who was hit by Gordon’s car. Dealing with Ashley and Gordon’s families as well as navigating friendships with the show’s supporting characters, Dyer and Brammall aim to strike a balance between showcasing familial issues and situations, while also making their audience laugh.

Below, Brammall and Dyer talk about which ideas were scrapped for season two, what scenes made Dyer break and what’s in store for a potential third season. Caution: Spoilers ahead.

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When you finished up season one, did you know you would be getting a season two?

PATRICK BRAMMALL We hoped we would get a second season because as we were making it through the writing process and shooting and editing, we kept having ideas about things like, “Oh, maybe that doesn’t fit in this narrative, but maybe another time.”

HARRIET DYER Patty had a note on his notes app on his phone with all these ideas we had.

BRAMMALL We have all these beautiful actors and a huge ensemble, and [we thought], we’d love for these two people to meet, or whatever. So we hoped there’d be a second. We knew that we liked the show. We looked at each other at the end of season one, and we’re like, “We can’t complain. They let us do exactly the show we wanted to make.”

DYER Yeah, anything we don’t like is our fault. But we did leave it a little ambiguous at the end of season one, because no one had seen it yet. We didn’t know if it was going to be a hit or shit. If it was like a middling at best show, that would be a really big nightmare. And we just didn’t know if they’d pick it up. But season two, we’ve kind of forced their hand.

BRAMMALL At the end of season one, the last line is a plot point, so we did leave the door open. But season two was certainly more cheeky than that.

What were some season two early ideas you threw out?

BRAMMALL I’ll tell you that there was one in episode five when Ashley loses her phone on the train. We did have a sequence, which we ended up replacing with the one where she gets picked up by the creepy couple — Incidentally, those two actors directed the episode as well — so we ended up using that. But what we wrote initially was that Ashley ends up buying alcohol for those two teenagers who wouldn’t help her, and she ends up at a 16-year-old’s party, and ends up taking some hallucinogenic drugs. We wrote a bit where she realizes she’s taking drugs, goes to the toilet and looks in the mirror and goes, “Okay, you’re going to be fine. Just get out of here.” And she opens the door and walks out and everybody is played by toddlers.

DYER The same characters, wearing the same outfits, but toddler versions. And then there’s a knock on the door and these toddler police officers say, “Sorry, can you keep it down? Guys, guys, keep it down.” And she’s spinning. We loved that bit, and yet, that part of it didn’t ring true in some way.

BRAMMALL I think it snapped the show a bit because structurally, that episode was quite different anyway.

DYER It pushed it too hard. Still, I want to use that joke.

From where do you guys draw inspiration for your characters?

DYER All my medical stuff is from a friend, Steph, who’s a real doctor. So “Mango Man” is real… he kept presenting with mangoes in his butt, and the trying to get your foreskin back thing was real. I steal my medical buddies’ stuff, but otherwise, it’s friends of friends, family members. It’s amalgamations. For instance, Lynelle [Helen Thomson] isn’t really like my mum at all, but there’s a hint of it. There’s enough of a springboard, and then she’s like 90 percent my friend’s mum, or, you know, other people.

BRAMMALL There’s a lot of leaping off and little behaviors in people that we remember or see, and then a healthy dose of just pure fiction.

DYER There’s so much borrowed. Our friends and family are constantly under the microscope.

BRAMMALL Oftentimes you can’t make this shit up. Like, humans are very strange, contrary creatures.

Do you show your friends the show and then they’re like, “Wait, is that based on me?“

BRAMMALL Very few people have said that, and we have worried about that one or two times.

DYER We have a lot of influences, which is good, and we have a lot of friends, and a lot of friends who are really normal people. But like, if they tell us a story, we’re going to catch it. We’ve got sticky brains. Very sticky. But it’s all with love and respect, isn’t it?

Were there any scenes that made you break this season?

DYER That one at the end of episode four, where Gordon puts on the hat. The hat was something that I wrote in the script, just in the sense that Meggles [Emma Harvie] shows a picture to Ashley on her phone of Rumi [Virginia Gay] in an annoying hat. And then the costume department, because they’re geniuses, went, how about she wears an annoying hat to the restaurant? And then our amazing director, Trent O’Donnell, was like, “Let’s do a whole ‘he’s going to try to help, but he doesn’t know where to put it.’” So we kind of built this bit throughout the day, because that entire dinner scene was shot throughout the day, and we just kept adding the hat. That was all improv.

BRAMMALL When Ashley goes to get the check, that’s because Harriet couldn’t—

DYER I couldn’t sit there. I was laughing so much, ruining the scene. Luckily, I was the writer of the episode, and I went, “I think Ashley should get the check.” And so I got up and left and that’s why, at the end of the scene, there’s just three of them, because I fucking couldn’t sit there. Actually, even that bit about the ethical porn, where Gordon goes like “Peter… Cock,” I laughed all the way through that, and I think they had to VFX the tape together where I wasn’t laughing to match the performance of him we actually wanted, because I ruined all of them.

The Yass episode – did you just take the worst stories you’ve ever heard about meeting families and put them into one episode?

BRAMMALL It was 100 percent based on my family.

DYER No! It’s a mix, I mean, for example, Patty’s character’s dad, the character, isn’t his father, and he’s not my father. He’s a mix of a bunch of people. But you know those two bits where his mum took me for a walk? One about abortion and the other being “do you think he’s gay because someone had an immunization” was said to me once, I reckon 11 years ago, and it just stayed in my head as the most outrageous thing someone could say.

BRAMMALL But also with that episode, it was sort of an echo of meeting her mom and her creepy boyfriend, Lee, and the idea that when you see your partner with their family for the first time, you go, “Oh… I see. It makes sense.” But also, we wanted to have Ash be like, “Oh, fuck. I don’t know if I like him with his family.” His actually being away from his family is kind of a success story when you think about it. But when he’s back with them, he’s scared of his dad, he just sits with all the men, he’s a misogynist, and it’s a bit icky.

DYER We wanted his family to be a threat to their relationship. Like, who are you? Where did you come from? Because you seem to be kind of forward thinking and modern and have feminist attributes in your life, but then to go so many decades back, as soon as you walk through your parent’s door, which is actually not Patty at all, but, like, it’s also a very Australian thing to be having lunch and you’re constantly competing with the noise of the football. The television, we wanted it to be like another character and just the noise of the chaos. My family is so loud, there’s always a TV. And I would prefer that to quite boring, but it can be such an assault for a new person.

You guys address a lot of “woke culture” in your show. Is there ever hesitation to go to certain places? Is there something you don’t want to address on the show?

BRAMMALL I think we feel it out as we go. Ultimately, it’s what’s funniest and also what’s most revealing. Because what I think we love about comedy and about this show, is that it reveals everyone is very human. Everybody is connected through their idiocies, through their flaws, really. So there’s a moment with Lee at the end of episode eight at the bar saying what his pronouns are, and that’s funny. But it’s also like, this guy isn’t just a caricature. Yes, he is, but he’s also a human who maybe had the choice years ago to—

DYER He maybe would have been non-binary or gender fluid, or bisexual, or anything, but he was from a time where you better be straight or you shut up, right? And so giving that a voice, giving him a voice when it seems like he’s just a clown. I suppose it’s funny, but also we want to show the humanness on both sides. We know what our personal and political beliefs are, but we don’t ever have to bang them like a drum. We are extremely liberal. We don’t need to have all our characters think like us, though. It would be a boring show. But that’s why it’s so fun to draw people like Lynelle being the men’s rights activist and that guy who’s trying to buy Gordon’s brewery, just this huge capitalist asshole; these people that we fundamentally do not agree with. There’s nothing wrong with putting them on camera, because most of the people are laughing at them. But then a few people are going, “Oh, good point, right?” There are people that wouldn’t get the irony. There are people who wouldn’t necessarily know they’re the butt of the joke.

BRAMMALL That’s certainly, by the same token, not a reason to cater to that audience. We’re not going to blunt the humor or do something that we don’t find funny or interesting or human, to cater to everybody, because then you don’t have a point of view, and then it’s not a funny show. It’s like making something by committee. A big part of what makes this show work is the tone, and that tone only happens because Harri and I are the only writers, and we’re the showrunners, and we control the point of view through.

DYER We’d never do anything about body shaming or race, you know, those things that are just kind of wrong. But we can laugh at slightly politically skewed things. We definitely draw the line around there. Around being mean.

Let’s talk specifically about the Ethical Porn episode.

BRAMMALL It was interesting to write that episode, because we had to do a bit of anecdotal research with friends and stuff. We actually had to have a frank conversation.

DYER We were open, but we had to crack our own relationship open further in order to to look at it. And we hoped that at the end of that episode, it might have helped a few people have that conversation, because I know that a lot of women don’t care, because it’s like, less work they have to do, and then the other women care a lot, and they feel rejected.  Also some dudes just are so secretive about it, and that creates tension. I know people that are married with multiple children who have never talked about it, and it’s like, you’ve seen her give birth, and you can’t tell her that you’ve watched porn? Like it seems that intimacy has doors still, and that is what’s interesting to us as well.

Is there an update for season three?

BRAMMALL We have a lot of ideas. We haven’t started plotting it yet. And in fact, we don’t have an official green light for season three. But as we said, we sort of forced the hand of our overlords to make one. We’re confident.

DYER Patti did a clever thing of making sure that we shot that proposal fail on an iPhone, which we think in one way or another could play … if we don’t start shooting season three for 12 to 18 months or something, you can’t just set that up again and shoot. So now we have the real proposal on our iPhone. And so I feel like that’s a really cool idea that Patty had, a real golden nugget that we’ve got to put in at some point, even if it’s in a compilation of proposal fails on YouTube four years ago. We know that we want to just keep exploring falling in love and getting in your own way, and the messiness that are modern-day relationships. So that’s all we know. We don’t think we’re necessarily going to just jump way forward into a domestic bliss situation. I feel like there’s more to be mined before that, but we’re not sure. We might do a time jump, or we might go straight on.

Colin From Accounts season two is now streaming all episodes on Paramount+.