Amid overemployment, a comedy gem emerged

For actors, there seem to be two states of existence.
One is unemployment. That’s most of the people, most of the time.
The other is overemployment. For a long stretch, that was Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer. “It was a very hectic 18 months,” he said.
Now comes the pay-off: While rushing between other roles, they wrote, produced and starred in the final season of “Colin From Accounts” (shown here); all eight episodes — funny, warm and engaging — arrive Sept. 10 on Paramount+.
“Those 18 months were an odyssey,” Dyer told the Television Critics Association. So much so, Brammall added, that they never had three hours to see the “Odyssey” movie.
She was starring in CBS’ “DMV”; he was co-starring in a movie (“The Devil Wears Prada 2” ) and a mini-series (“Last Seen,” which arrives on Apple the day before “Colin”).
She was in Montreal, he was in Melbourne. Also, they’re married and have adopted two babies; it got complicated.
What emerged is a portrayal of two flawed people, opposites in many ways, who belong together … even if they won’t admit it.
And how do they contrast in real life?
“We see the world in opposite ways,” Dyer said. “We’re essentially saying the same thing, but he comes at it from a different way.”
One more thing: “I’m also very anxious,” she said. He’s not, but the gap may be closing: “I’m giving him disorders.”
For now, she said, “he’s a stoic.” He had the norovirus, felt awful, but kept doing his scenes; during breaks, “he just went out and laid on the grass.”
There’s also the age difference. She’s 37 and plays a 30-year-old; he’s 50 and of AARP age. When they met, he’d already starred in movies, a mini-series (playing Rupert Murdoch) and four Australian series. The fifth was “No Activity,” which he co-created, starred in and did an American version.
Brammall played a crusty cop; for the Aussie version, Dyer was a rookie with anger issues, having just tased a man to death for not taking her seriously. Naturally, an off-screen romance ensued.
They went on with their separate careers, sliding between continents. (She co-starred in NBC’s “American Auto.”) Then “Colin” was created.
“She’d never written anything before,” Brammall said. “She wrote it in four days. No one had told her it should take more than four days to write a pilot.”
In her story, Gordon (Brammall) was a confident barkeep. Ashley (Dyer) was a medical student; usually hesitant, she suddenly flashed a stranger.
That was Gordon. Understandably distracted, he ran into a dog. They took it to a vet, argued, paid a huge bill and named him Colin From Accounts.
(Yes, “Colin From Accounts” bears a dog’s name, just like “Lassie,” “Benji,” “Rex,” “Rin Tin Tin” and “Old Yeller.”)
Soon, they found they love Colin and didn’t hate each other. It was a start.
The first two seasons — ending with Gordon’s disastrous, drunken proposal — drew raves. The Rotten Tomatoes site found 100-percent approval among critics and called the show “funny, cranky and delightful.” The show thrived in Australia and streamed in the U.S., overcoming the fact that some of the accents are quite thick.
But the success made it hard to continue. “Colin” led to other jobs, they said. Brammall landed the Apple mini-series; in “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” he plays the boyfriend of Anne Hathaway, who’s reportedly a “Colin” fan.
Meanwhile, Dyer was filming “DMV,” while scrambling to find time to write the final “Colin” season. She asked the crew people to tell her when a next scene was at least a half-hour away; if it was, she scrambled off to write. “It was kind of fun. I felt like I was doing mental acrobatics.”
Dyer’s scripts don’t make it easy for anyone. For this season’s third episode (directed by her sister Madeleine), she wrote a nine-minute-40-second scene that puts Ash and Gordon (only briefly interrupted) in a restaurant, sifting through a rich set of contrasting emotions.
“We both came up in theater,” Brammall said, “so we love doing the whole thing …. I think we did eight takes of it.”
Dyer said she feels a tad guilty about writing a long scene. “I get nervous about taking up people’s time too much.”
But hey, nervousness may be at the core of the fictional Ashley or the real Dyer. Put them alongside the once-cocky Gordon or the stoical Brammall and you have a rich tale of opposites.