Colin from Accounts has the courage to let its characters grow up and it is not sure that was a good idea

The first two seasons of Colin from Accounts ran on a simple and effective engine: two people who should not be together are thrown together by a dog, and their inability to behave like normal adults in the presence of romantic possibility generates the comedy. It worked. It worked so well that the show became the most successful Australian comedy export since Kath & Kim, picked up audiences in the UK and the US, and made Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer into the closest thing Australian television has to a prestige comedy power couple. (They are married in real life, which helps, because the chemistry is the kind you cannot manufacture in a writers’ room.)

Season three arrives with a problem that every romantic comedy eventually faces and almost none of them solve: the couple is together. They are stable. They are, by the standards of the first two seasons, functional. The dog is old. The chaos that drove the early episodes has been replaced by something quieter and less obviously funny, which is the daily reality of two people who have chosen each other and must now figure out what that means beyond the initial thrill of mutual disaster.

This is the rom-com third-season wall, and Colin from Accounts hits it at speed.

Domesticity is not inherently funny

The show knows this. You can feel it in the writing, which works harder in season three than it has ever had to work. Brammall and Dyer, who created the series and write it together, have made the honest choice: they have let Gordon and Ashley grow up. Gordon has a degree of professional stability. Ashley is no longer making decisions that a reasonable person would describe as “catastrophically impulsive.” They have a routine. They have furniture they chose together. They have the kind of arguments that real couples have, about household logistics and social obligations and whose turn it is to take Colin to the vet.

The problem is that this is all true to life and not especially dynamic on screen. The early seasons derived their energy from instability. Gordon and Ashley were people in transition, ricocheting between bad decisions and moments of unexpected grace, and the comedy lived in the gap between who they were and who they wanted to be. In season three, the gap has narrowed. They are closer to the people they want to be, and closer is less interesting than far away, at least in comic terms.

The supporting cast is carrying more weight

The show compensates by pushing the ensemble harder. The supporting characters, who were always good but previously functioned as satellites around the central pairing, are now doing structural work. Gordon’s mates get subplots that would have been B-stories in earlier seasons and are now closer to co-leads. Ashley’s family dynamics, always a reliable source of tension, are given more room to breathe and occasionally more room than the material can sustain.

This is a familiar pattern. When the centre of a show stabilises, the edges have to move. Offspring did this for years, cycling through supporting-character romances and professional crises to keep the energy up while Nina Proudman’s central story threatened to settle. Please Like Me did it more gracefully, partly because Josh Thomas was always willing to let his character be genuinely unhappy in ways that kept the centre unstable. Colin from Accounts is trying to find a middle path: keep the leads together, keep them functional, and find new sources of friction that do not require them to regress.

The dog problem

Colin the dog is old. This is not a spoiler; it is visible on screen. The border terrier who was a puppy in season one is now a senior dog, and the show, to its credit, does not pretend otherwise. Colin moves slower. He sleeps more. He is still the reason Gordon and Ashley are together, and the show has the intelligence to let that origin story sit quietly in the background rather than dramatising it every episode.

But there is a tension in the premise now. The dog was the inciting incident. The dog was the excuse. What happens to a show built on a meet-cute when the meet-cute is seven years old and arthritic? Colin from Accounts does not fully answer this question in season three, but it is aware of it, and that awareness gives the season a slight melancholy that was absent from the earlier runs.

Can Australian comedy do the long game?

The honest answer is: rarely, and not always well. Australian comedies tend to burn bright and short. Kath & Kim ran four seasons but the last two were diminished. Utopia has maintained quality over five seasons by essentially resetting to zero each year, which works because the target (government bureaucracy) is inexhaustible. Please Like Me ran four seasons and ended perfectly. Summer Heights High was one season and a series of increasingly diminished returns in different formats.

The shows that sustain are the ones that find a way to keep their central tension alive without artificially prolonging it. Colin from Accounts is at the crossroads. The central tension, will they or will they not, has been resolved. The new tension, can they sustain it, is real and relatable but less inherently comic. Season three is good. It is funny in places and honest in others and the performances remain excellent. Brammall is still the best reactor in Australian comedy; his face does more in a two-shot than most actors manage with a monologue. Dyer is still capable of a line reading that makes you rewind to hear it again.

But there is a sense, persistent and hard to shake, that the show has reached the point where honesty and entertainment are pulling in different directions. The honest version of Colin from Accounts season three is a show about two people navigating the mild tedium of a stable relationship. The entertaining version needs crises, complications, reversals. Brammall and Dyer are trying to serve both, and the effort is visible in a way it was not before.

I hope they figure it out. The show deserves a fourth season. Whether the premise can sustain one is a question that season three raises without quite answering, which is either courageous or inconclusive depending on your tolerance for ambiguity. Mine is high, but even I left the finale thinking: where do you go from here?

Somewhere good, hopefully. Colin deserves a nap.