Marta is not having a good day; she’s just stumbled out of an all-night party, with a wicked hangover. Raúl’s day is even worse: he’s been diagnosed with cancer of the heart — and before he got around to telling his girlfriend, she went and dumped him. Marta and Raúl, the leads in Apple TV’s Love You to Death, are two Thirty-somethings living in Barcelona; they don’t know each other, though they went to the same high school — but on this particular day, both wind up at the funeral of a former classmate. (Marta feels obligated to go because he was her first boyfriend — or is it the first guy she slept with? Raúl is dragged there by his roommate and best friend Edu, who says he knew the deceased well.)
Marta is insightful when it comes to her friends and family, but has little capacity for self-reflection. Nonetheless, she senses there’s more going on than a hangover, and grabs a pregnancy test on her way to church. And with an irreverence that we can already tell is typical, she takes the test in the church lavatory, and reads it in the sanctuary, minutes into the service. When she sees that it’s positive, she gasps loudly and, as luck would have it — because she is not having a good day — it’s just as the priest is inviting friends to speak. So he calls upon Marta to eulogize the deceased, and from her seat in the pews, she improvises:
What can I say about David? I can say that I haven't seen him since grade school. He was a great friend, right? And all those things that I'm sure you're all going to say about him when it's your turn.
Except Marta is not given to platitudes. She prides herself on her candor. So perhaps it’s inevitable that it takes only a few sentences for her to pivot to the truth:
Look, David was a fucking mess.
The congregation is outraged, but Marta couldn’t care less. She’s off and running:
Maybe he wasn't the world's greatest son. Did he steal money from his parents to buy drugs? Possibly. Well, one time. At least one time that I'm aware of. Maybe he wasn't the best boyfriend in the world. He cheated on his girlfriend — I don't know how many times. Sometimes with me.
Edu admits to Raúl, “I fucked him too.” The deceased’s girlfriend questions her best friend: “He cheated on me?” “Didn't you cheat too?” “That's not the same thing.” “A little bit. You are kind of slutty.”
Marta is in advertising. So even when she’s out of control, as she is now, she knows how to pull off a presentation. She reads the room and makes an adjustment:
What I’m trying to say is… I think he did the best he could. Just like the rest of us, right? We all screw up. We screw up a lot. We screw up a hell of a lot. But, hey, nobody's perfect, right? Plus, who cares? Because, in the end, there's nothing after we die, when we're all dust. Nothing.
And that gets Raúl’s attention.
All that matters is what we did, what we experienced, how we experienced it. Whether we made the most of our lives. That's the gift David has given us. We need to live life to the fullest, no matter what. He taught us what we need in life.
It may be what Marta believes (or maybe it’s just what she knows sells), but it’s not what she’s practiced. One could argue she’s made the least of her life. She’s been with a lot of guys and done a lot of drugs — but what has it amounted to? What has it amounted to now that she’s pregnant? As for Raúl, it’s empowering to be reminded that we need to live life to the fullest, no matter how long we have left; after all, his doctor’s office, lacking any kind of bedside manner, has informed him he has a 30% chance of survival. But it’s not the upbeat part of Marta’s speech that appeals to him most; it’s the downbeat part. It’s oddly comforting to hear he’ll be forgotten 10 minutes after he’s gone. On a day when he’s learned he'll be having risky surgery — and probably die alone — accepting that nothing matters actually makes him worry less; it’s the aggressively bleak message he didn't know he needed. He feels a kinship with Marta that surprises him; at the end of the service, he approaches her to tell her how much she liked her speech, but she’s too distracted to hear him. It’s not just the pregnancy; the guy who drove her there is outside, expecting sex, and she’s not in the mood. So she asks Raúl out for coffee, and that’s their first date. She’s pregnant; he may be dead in three weeks. He wants to discuss the meaninglessness of existence, and she’s using him to blow off a possible hookup.
A promising start to a relationship, right?
Apple TV describes Raúl and Marta’s first encounter as a “meet-cute.” These days, I guess “meet-cute” means “to meet under unusual circumstances.” Love You to Death, mercifully, doesn’t begin with a meet-cute; it starts with something richer, darker and messier. And it keeps getting richer, darker and messier across seven episodes. Love You to Death is the rare and remarkable romcom that keeps throwing its characters into screwball situations, yet manages to deepen them each time it does. The opening episode is the key to it all. The person at a funeral inadvertently prompted into giving a eulogy — how many times have we seen that one? But maybe not when it’s about one of the leads displaying the kind of self-absorption that prompts the other to embrace their mortality. Love You to Death uses the specificity of its characters to make common situations decidedly uncommon, and uses its dramatic underpinnings to give them weight. There are plots that wouldn’t be out of place on a ’70s sitcom — “Can you pretend to be my boyfriend when my parents visit?” and “How do I keep the two women I’m juggling from meeting when they both show up at my office?” It’s even got one of my all-time least favorite plots: the first date where one of the characters takes something — or is given something — to help them relax. But all three episodes are blissfully funny and gratifyingly unsettling. That the show can scale such powerful heights while reinventing such old chestnuts is due largely to the fact that it’s built on a solid foundation. And it’s grounded by leads with sensational chemistry.
As Marta, Verónica Echegui has a delivery that makes every invitation sound like a dare and every assertion an assault. Yet her red cropped hair and apple cheekbones give her a pixieish look that runs counter to her personality; she's unpredictable and irresistible. Joan Amargós is Raúl, and his expression is more hangdog. His beard makes his face seem to naturally settle into a frown, but when he finds reason to smile, he grows liberated and luminous. The actors are able to communicate the sense of completeness their characters feel when they’re together: something they themselves don’t fully recognize, let alone have the capacity to put into words. You see how transformative the attraction is. Raúl embodies all that Marta’s life could become if she accepted responsibility: saner, sounder, but never dull. (Although he’s less impulsive than she is, he’s still susceptible to her flights of fancy.) Marta alerts Raúl to possibilities he’s overlooked; she gets his creative juices flowing. (To her surprise — and ours — he has a gift for improvisation that matches her own.) She doesn’t force him to face down his fears; she give him permission to forget them.
Love You to Death imagines a world where even the most straight-laced characters seem to be waiting for their walk on the wild side. Raúl works HR at a car dealership, and doesn’t get a lot of respect from the salesmen there, until they find out that both Marta and his ex — who moved back in once she learned about his diagnosis — have arrived at the showroom at the same time, and need to be kept apart. And they instantly engage in a caper to distract Raul’s ex, so the two women never meet. They fall into Raúl’s improv just as easily as he falls into Marta’s; the craziness is contagious. Love You to Death — created by Dani de la Orden, and co-written by Oriol Capel and Natalia Duran — is in Spanish, which means you’re left doing triple duty: reading the subtitles, following the action and studying the faces. Yet despite the distractions, I found myself grinning and giggling throughout. At times I was overcome with waves of laughter that continued unchecked for five or ten minutes. (This is a show so assured, it even pulls off that romcom staple — the breakup before the penultimate episode — without sacrificing energy, inspiration or humor. Name me another show that manages that.) Love You to Death is about fear of the unknown; it’s about broken promises and faithless friends and love’s bad timing. And yet it pulls something funny out of every worst-case scenario; it's like Murphy's Law with a smiley face. Despite its grim subject matter, it’s the year’s sunniest surprise.
On March 22, 1983, John O’Connor, TV critic for The New York Times, had an announcement to make: “At 9 this evening, CBS is presenting a ‘romantic comedy’ that actually turns out to be a romantic comedy.” The show in question was a made-for-TV movie entitled The Other Woman, starring Hal Linden, Anne Meara and Madolyn Smith. Meara wrote it along with Lila Garrett, and the two of them took home a Writer’s Guild Award for it. O’Connor raved, as did Judith Crist in TV Guide. As did I, upon watching, to everyone I could find. I still have a copy on VHS, and the show is as funny and astute now as it was then: a romcom before the word existed, about an unhappy middle-aged widower who falls for and marries a woman half his age (his daughter’s ex-roommate). Her energy and enthusiasm renew him — and exhaust him, too — and then into his life walks a woman closer to his age, who shares his passions and outlook and frame of reference in a way his young wife doesn’t. And this middle-aged woman — Anne Meara — suddenly finds herself “the other woman” in a love triangle. Running maybe 96 minutes without commercials, The Other Woman is a marvel of economy, wit, insight and feeling. Aside from providing splendid parts for its three leads, it establishes a host of supporting characters who are not merely well-defined in and of themselves, but who help support the premise: when it comes to relationships, compatibility matters. Opposites attract, it’s true — particularly temperamentally — but there’s also something exciting about finding someone with whom you share interests or goals or history. It’s not sexy to say it, but compatibility can be an aphrodisiac.
The strangest thing about Netflix’s romcom Nobody Wants This is that the couple at the heart of the story — Kristen Bell’s Joanne and Adam Brody’s Noah — seem to have nothing in common. It’s a romantic comedy predicated on the notion that all you need to build a lasting relationship is sexual compatibility and chemistry. Even though episodes give lip service to Noah and Joanne wanting to get to know each other better — there’s even one where Noah determines to dig deeper into their relationship — those episodes inevitably end with the two of them falling into bed, having learned nothing. Having gained no real insights. From what we see, Joanne and Noah don’t ever stop to talk about anything other than their work, and there they have no common ground. She’s a self-involved millennial who does a podcast with her sister about sex and dating (a standard episode might be — and is — discussing a new vibrator); he’s studying to be a rabbi. I personally don’t know any couples who have sustained long-term relationships having absolutely nothing in common, and perhaps that issue will become focal in Season 2, but I doubt it. This is a series Erin Foster wrote about her own relationship with her husband, and they’ve been together — happily, from what we can tell — for seven years now. Joanne and Noah’s lack of shared interests doesn’t seem to be the point of the show; it seems to be the aspect of the series that’s awkwardly overlooked. (Foster keeps breaking away to subplots involving supporting characters we couldn’t care less about, because with Noah and Joanne unable to engage in meaningful conversation, there doesn’t seem to be enough plot to fill 10 episodes.)
Nobody Wants This is one of those “I’ve never met anybody like you” romcoms, but taken to an unlikely extreme. Noah and Joanne are so ignorant of each other’s way of life, they might as well be two alien species. They live in Los Angeles, but she’s apparently gotten through a good three decades without learning anything about Judaism, including those words that have so insinuated themselves into the English language — like mazel tov and bar mitzvah — that you don’t have to italicize them when you include them in your blog. We’re not supposed to judge her, or be fascinated or even appalled by the kind of cocoon she must’ve grown up in, to have made no lasting relationships among the city’s half-million Jewish residents; at a time when antisemitism is on the rise globally, we are apparently supposed to find her complete ignorance of Judaism unconcerning. And we’re not meant to judge Adam for being unaware that shallow people like Joanne exist (in Los Angeles, of all places, a city that makes it easy to earn a living just by espousing opinions); he apparently has never had any exposure to a town in which blandness and blondness rule. Has he never turned on the TV and heard that annoying “Extra Extra” song, and watched a few minutes of celebrity gossip in gaping disbelief? The best rabbis and ministers I have known — and we are most assuredly meant to think that Noah would make a good rabbi — have had a thirst for learning about how the vast hordes of humanity live, not just the 30 or 40 people who pass through their house of worship weekly. The show establishes two characters who have lived their lives in a bubble, but never bothers to ask the questions “why” and “how”?
The show got some pushback for its depiction of Judaism — and Jewish women in particular. Foster (not Jewish) met her future husband (Jewish) in 2017, and before they married a year later, he insisted she convert. And she did, according to her, quite willingly, and she found herself learning much more than the tenets of Judaism; she found herself immersed in its philosophy. But none of that made its way to the screen. Judaism is treated less like a religion or a way of life and more like a cult, where everyone is brainwashed into becoming the same sort of person. There are three key Jewish women in the show — Noah’s mother, his ex-girlfriend and his brother’s wife — and they’re all manipulative shrews. Foster, mysteriously, seems to think Jews are easily categorized: not only in terms of personality, but in terms of adherence to their religion. There’s no talk about whether Noah is reformed or conservative or orthodox; he’s just a Jew — aren’t they all alike? Joanne, upon meeting Noah‘s family, commits the cardinal sin of bringing prosciutto as a gift; I know very few Jewish families who keep kosher, but on Nobody Wants This, you’re led to think that every family does: that they adhere to the same rules and follow the same customs. (My family had its own traditions when I was growing up: we didn’t eat bacon except with breakfast, we didn’t eat ham except in split pea soup, we didn’t each pork except when we went out for Chinese food.) But in Nobody Wants This, bringing a non-kosher item to a Jewish household is a cardinal sin. (It could have been avoided if Joanne and Noah had actually discussed his family’s practices ahead of time, but that would have involved their having, you know, a conversation about themselves.) There’s a juvenile sitcom gag after Noah’s mother tosses the prosciutto away; Joanne walks into the kitchen later and finds Noah’s mother gorging on it — food that, mind you, she’s already thrown in the trash. (Joanne then has “ammunition” to use against Noah’s mother.) Judaism is apparently one of those things you grin and bear, but don’t actually like; the implied message is that the restrictions of Judaism are so universal and so oppressive that Jewish people would kill to be Christians for a day. Hell, they’d fish food out of the trash just to feast on its forbidden pleasures. (For those with long memories, the 1971 sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie — from the master of the romantic comedy, Bernard Slade, who had already given us the first two seasons of Bewitched, plus Love on a Rooftop — offered a more loving and accurate representation of Judaism, and of the challenges faced by couples of different faiths. None of us of a certain age need reminding that television was infinitely more daring 40 and 50 years ago, but perhaps it’s worth pointing out for the younger folks among us.)
But the criticisms of Foster’s depiction of Judaism, I think — accurate as they are — miss the point. Nobody gets off scot-free in Nobody Wants This. Foster isn’t any kinder to the characters on the other side of the aisle. If half the romcom is an assault on Judaism, the other half is an assault on millennials — in particular, on straight white millennials who define themselves by their online visibility and popularity. (That might include Foster herself. Describing her husband in TODAY.com as a “private" person, she admits, with what sounds a bit like boasting, “Being married to someone like me is his personal hell." She doesn’t seem to realize that’s not the flex she thinks it is.) When Joanne, curious to learn more about Noah’s ex, goes hunting for her on social media, she’s aghast to learn that she doesn’t have an Instagram account. She asks her interchangeable friends, “How do people know when she goes on vacation?” — and it’s not said ironically. This is her set of values. And they’re not just hers. In a typical sitcom contrivance, while Noah is getting advice from his friends about getting to know Joanne better, she’s getting advice from her pals about keeping it light. Her sister advises her, “Don't show him how much you like him. He'll have nothing to chase. Why drink the milk when you can buy the cow for free?” She stops to wonder if she has the metaphor right, then decides she does, and repeats it — so we can get two feeble laughs for the price of one. By this point, we are perilously close to Ricky telling Lucy not to count her chickens until her bridges is crossed — except in this case there doesn’t seem to be a language barrier. It’s more like an IQ barrier.
All this might suggest that I didn’t enjoy Nobody Wants This. I did: quite a lot. Foster manages to build a gentle romcom on the most abrasive and abusive of stereotypes. And ironically, because she develops two leads who barely take the time to get to know each other, she doesn’t fall into that common romcom trap of having the leads squabble over some issue or another each and every episode. (They barely know each other; what would they fight about?) But nonetheless, the missteps are far more fascinating than the accomplishments. There are a few times when Joanne opens up about her flaws — and her fear that they’ll keep her from finding and settling down with someone. “Sometimes I do weird shit,” she warns Noah, “and I can be impulsive and obsessive.” Her greatest anxiety is becoming “emotionally dependent on a guy who will one day realize that I'm too much and break my heart.” You think you might be watching Joanne grow up a little, even as she puts these feelings into words — but although Noah says all the right things in return, that doesn’t keep Joanne from self-sabotaging the next chance she gets, which is when Noah meets her parents. Joanne freaks out when Noah turns up in a sports coat and brings her mother flowers — and even worse, when Noah — running on adrenaline and thirsting for approval — pronounces an Italian word with an Italian accent in an attempt to be funny. In other words, she’s upset that Noah tries hard to impress her parents. That’s the deal-breaker for her. And then — with her sister as a captive audience, delighted the relationship is failing (because she has no apparent generosity of spirit) — Joanne proceeds to launch into the litany of guys she’s dumped because of one thing they did that she could not get past: “Remember when I saw Wyatt running with a backpack? It just kept on, like, clapping against his body?” Or even worse: “When I was about to move in with Anthony, then I saw him chasing a ping-pong ball? He could still be chasing it for all I know.” Foster keeps giving Joanne a measure of self-awareness that disappears the moment she think she can milk her self-absorption for more laughs.
According to Foster, once she nailed down the show’s concept, she knew it felt right: “Falling in love later in life, two people from different worlds trying to make it work. Jewish, non-Jewish. It seemed clean.” It is clean. It’s so clean, it’s practically antiseptic. There’s none of the mess you love in a good romcom, because it never digs deep enough to get to the dirt. Joanne is self-centered and shallow; Noah is romanticized: the ideal friend and lover. Only the way the show takes a funhouse mirror to Foster’s own life is gratifyingly discomfiting. What Nobody Wants This ultimately says is that you can be as crazy and neurotic as you want, and you can still land yourself a prince — and a Jewish prince at that. And you won’t have to make any concessions — he’ll love you for who you are, and give up his entire sense of self to be with you. (Late in the season, Joanne decides to convert because it’s essential to Noah’s ability to practice as a rabbi. She gives it the old college try for about four-and-a-half minutes, then decides it’s too much effort, so he offers to give up his dreams instead. That’s what the show postures is a happy ending.) Foster’s real-life story went just the other way — her fiancé told her she’d have to convert, and she did, learning aspects of Judaism that she found useful and powerful and even life-altering. In the TV series, her doppelgänger doesn’t have to learn anything. The man of her dreams gives up everything to be with her. And as noted, this may just be the first step of the journey, and there may be a turnaround coming in Season 2. But what we’re left with at the end of Season 1 — not a bad point at which to judge a series — is an author turning her own life into a semi-autobiographical work of fiction, and basically exploring a version that would have suited her more: one in which she didn’t have to put in the energy and make the concessions that continue to gall her to this day. That’s more disturbingly real than anything on the screen — an honest glimpse into her husband’s personal hell.
Unlike Love You to Death, Colin from Accounts opens with a meet-cute — in this case, one that involves permanently disabling a dog. Once it pulls that off, you figure it can manage just about anything.
Driving to work one day, Gordon gets to a pedestrian walkway where Ashley is about to make her way across. He invites her to proceed, she invites him to go, and back and forth, until she gratefully accepts the right-of-way, and as a way of saying thank you, bares her breast. And he stares — and keeps staring long after she’s exited the crosswalk and tucked it away. And when the cars behind him get impatient and start to honk, he proceeds along without looking and hits a border collie. “Shit, shit, shit,” he freaks out, and because she’s at least partly responsible, calls out to her, “Hey, you! Nipple!” She turns around, sees the injured canine — and the story gets underway. Gordon is maybe 40, sweet but not too handsome, and owns a microbrewery; Ashley is at least 10 years younger, blonde and pretty, and a med student. And at this moment, they have nothing in common, except they both contributed to the maiming of a pup, who — when the vet is done with him (to the tune of $12,000) — has a wheelchair for his hind legs, and will need constant care, including having his bladder regularly expressed. (They christen the dog Colin, and when Ashley offers to help Gordon get his creditors to pay, she writes them from “Colin from accounts” — thus the title of the show.)
Husband and wife Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer wrote Colin from Accounts for themselves. (They started dating in 2017, then married in 2021 after a five-day engagement.) He’s 13 years older than her, so visually, at least, they’re an unlikely pair. The scripts are careful not to gloss over their characters’ differences: not just in age, but in temperament, focus and lifestyle. But caring for Colin helps them maneuver and even ignore issues that — in a coupling that evolved more typically — might be deal-breakers. And at the same time, we watch how co-parenting forces them to lead with their best — and most compatible — qualities: caring, compassion, shared responsibility. This is a couple that, you sense, never would have found each other had they not found themselves looking after an injured dog.
Colin From Accounts premiered in Australia on the streaming channel Binge, then made its way to BBC iPlayer and Paramount+. Wherever it goes, it’s a runaway hit (Season 3 is already underway), and it’s easy to see why: there are proper bits of silliness (e.g., a vet named Yvette), but most of it involves fresh takes on familiar formulas. The premise allows Gordon and Ashley to get to know each other obliquely, as they look after Colin, and in doing so, it refreshes romcom elements we’ve seen again and again. They think they’re falling in love with a dog, but have no idea they’re falling for each other. And as a result, there are none of the “new relationship” pressures that usually consume the early episodes of romcoms; the only new relationship here is with Colin. They’re two people caring for a pup who can’t care for himself. But by the end of episode 3, Gordon and Ashley are at the microbrewery, enjoying a drink, and Ashley is ready to learn a little more:
Ashley: Why do you think you’re single?
Gordon: Wow.
Ashley: I mean, you’ve got such a nice bar and good hair.
Gordon: Why do you think you’re single?
Ashley: Well, I’m newly single so I don’t really know yet, but I get the feeling that you’re quite single.
Gordon: How come?
Ashley: The unicycle. And the punching bag.
Gordon: Wow, man, you buy one unicycle —
Ashley: — and the stationary bike and the drums.
Gordon: Yeah, look, I mean, “I don’t know” is the answer. I really just work most of the time. I mean, I’m on all the dating apps. I’m on all the apps. I don’t know. Maybe it feels a bit empty to me. Maybe I’m expecting too much.
Ashley: Do you do the old “I sleep with the owner” “personal beer tasting” move much?
Gordon: It’s not a move. I don’t — It’s not a move.
Ashley: This is not a move?
Gordon: Oh my God! Is it working?
Ashley: No.
Gordon: Damn.
Ashley: I’m just kidding. Come here.
And she pulls him in for a kiss, as Colin stares up at them, barely visible behind his plastic cone. Season 1 includes a lot of the requisite sitcom elements. There are the standard misunderstandings; there’s the obligatory “meet the parents” episode. But nothing seems insurmountable. In fact, you’d argue that everything is going smoothly until the penultimate episode of Season 1, when Gordon offers to throw Ashley’s birthday party at his brewery, and we get a look at her friends. And we realize we’ve been played for fools. Everything has been so laser-focused on caring for Colin, Dyer and Brammall suckered us into thinking Ashley and Gordon were soulmates. But we’ve barely explored the differences that might make their relationship challenging (if not downright impossible); in fact, we’ve forgotten all about them. It’s a great blindside. Because as dozens of Ashley’s friends crowd into the microbrewery for her birthday party, we realize they’re the worst of Gen Z: rude and self-involved and affected. And although Ashley is the best of them, she’s the best of a bad lot. She lets her friends walk all over Gordon — because the truth is, they were her friends long before Gordon came along. She’s comfortable with them in a way she’s still learning to be comfortable with him. But her friends are ghastly. Although they’re in a brewery, they demand margaritas and mimosas. When Gordon innocuously tags their friend as “her” instead of “them” (Ashley corrects him, “they’re non-binary”), her friend taunts Gordon, “Oh honey, your boomer is showing!” And they laugh at him. And Ashley lets them — and later, after the party, when he confronts her, she doesn’t understand why he’s so upset. “Well, you just stood there all night and watched while your friends shat on me,” he insists. And he’s forced to admit, “I don’t think things are meant to be this hard early on.” So what next?
The startling thing about Season 1 is how selfish Ashley comes off by the end of it. Yet the duo’s desire to do right by this dog — and the affection for each other that they still can’t quite put into words — keeps you coming back for more. Season 2 is less about Gordon and Ashley raising a dog and more about them trying (and learning) to invest in themselves. It lacks the elliptical elements that made Season 1 so endearing, but what it loses in charm, it makes up for in candor. Nothing is off-limits in Colin From Accounts; there’s even an episode that wonders why men in relationships — even sexually satisfied ones — feel a need to masturbate on the side. But Dyer and Brammall always have a smart twist to put on an episode, or a fresh perspective. And just as the end of Season 1 is about digging more deeply into Ashley’s demons, the end of Season 2 does the same for Gordon. (The way the show takes its time in letting us get to know these two characters is a great part of its appeal.) When Gordon brings Ashley home to meet his family, we realize at once the source of all his insecurities. His father is a sadist and a sociopath, who mocks his son’s brewery with malicious glee, calling the product “coriander piss.” Gordon has lost track of how badly he’s been abused; it’s come to seem such a familiar dynamic, he doesn’t see how it’s cost him his self-esteem. But Ashley sees it — and yet, when she broaches it with him, he’s not ready to hear it. In Season 1, she couldn’t understand his issues with her friends; now he doesn’t understand why they can’t just have a nice weekend with his family. Needless to say, the weekend goes even worse than anyone could’ve predicted, so much so that by the time the family visit is over, you have no idea — heading into the Season 2 finale — if Gordon and Ashley’s relationship is salvageable. How have we gotten two seasons in, and these two characters have learned so little about each other? Colin From Accounts keeps pulling the rug out from under you, with almost sadistic glee. You keep thinking that caring for Colin is making the earlier parts of Ashley and Gordon’s relationship easier, but actually, it just keeps delaying all the hard parts. And when they come, they’re even more unbearable.
Colin from Accounts features a married couple both in front of and behind the camera, and it uses that fact to keep you off balance. You presume you’re getting a glimpse into Dyer and Brammall’s relationship — not the specifics, of course, but the dynamics; you figure at least part of the show is autobiographical, and that you’re seeing some of the challenges the couple has faced — and overcome — over the last eight years. But as it turns out, you’re fooled by the show’s résumé. Things don’t seem to get easier for Gordon and Ashley. In one sense, these two were destined to be together: they come with a ready-made family. Yet the more they learn not to rely on Colin as their buffer, the more they fall into old, bad habits. She can’t stop judging him; he can’t stop buckling under the weight of her judgment. So they keep acting out, right down to the final moments of Season 2, when you’re practically praying for a happy ending. Colin from Accounts is a devoutly romantic comedy that nonetheless has you wondering if “happily ever after” really comes. Was Colin the best thing that ever happened to Gordon and Ashley, or did he just delay the inevitable crash-and-burn?
Want more? I make the case for my favorite sci-fi series of 2024, Constellation. Elsewhere, check out an essay called "The Fatal Blow", highlighting three noir-tinged dramas, Dark Winds, Black Snow and Blue Lights; an essay called "Negotations", in praise of three series that brightened my 2022: Minx, The Ipcress File and Inside Man; an essay called "Men in the Middle," highlighting four drama series that owe much of their success to the onscreen personas of their leading men: The Tourist, This Is Going to Hurt, The Responder and Around the World in 80 Days; an essay entitled "Rough Edges," in praise of two addictive comedies that I discovered in 2021, Back to Life and The Other Two; another entitled "Private Faces," highlighting two spectacular series that emerged in the fall of 2020, Roadkill and Life; and a fifth called "Unwilling Victims," taking a look at three recent series by and about women: The Trial of Christine Keeler, Deadwater Fell and Flesh and Blood. I offer up The Five Best TV Shows You Might Not Be Watching, Five Foreign TV Dramas You Shouldn't Miss, and my most personal essay, inspired by the death of my puppy Czerny in June of 2021, The 10 Most Comforting TV Episodes About Death.
If you like in-depth looks at hit shows, I delve into Rhoda Season 3, Maude Season 2, Newhart Season 7, One Day at a Time Season 7, WKRP in Cincinnati Season 4 and Bewitched Season 2; serve up my 10 Best Episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Designing Women, WKRP in Cincinnati, Everybody Loves Raymond and Kate & Allie; pen an appreciation of Mike & Molly; and offer up some thoughts as to why The New Adventures of Old Christine took such a tumble in quality over its five seasons. Or if you prefer dramas, check out my write-ups of of Criminal Minds Season 8, Judging Amy Season 6, Voyager Season 4, Doctor Who Series 8, Cold Case Season 4, Gilmore Girls Season 7 (and the subsequent, ill-judged Netflix miniseries), and fourteen essays devoted to all the seasons of the great nighttime soap Knots Landing, starting here. I also look back at Murder, She Wrote and pick out The 10 Best "Murder She Wrote" Mysteries: not (necessarily) the best episodes, but the best whodunnits.
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