A weak year for rom-coms finally gets a truly great one

polygon.com:

It has not been a vintage year for romantic comedies. (It hasn’t been a vintage year for this undervalued genre for quite some time.) There have been just a couple of brighter spots: Rye Lane’s colorful walk-and-talk through the streets of South London, Red, White & Royal Blue’s fanfic-adjacent queer romance. In series, Apple’s Platonic, with the ever-delightful pairing of Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen, attempted to twist the genre to focus on an obsessive, semi-toxic friendship. It found some rich material on the way, but predictably floundered when it came to the payoff because it had nowhere to go. This is the thing with rom-coms: More than almost any other genre, they are incredibly strictly codified, and you really do have to play them by the book.

The trick is to follow the rules while making it look natural. That’s exactly what Colin from Accounts does. This very funny, very charming Australian series, which debuts on Paramount Plus this week, works so well because it hits all the marks a rom-com needs to, but does so with a little bit of spice and a lot of casual, lived-in authenticity.

That authenticity might stem from the fact that the show’s stars and creators, Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall, are a real-life couple. That’s not necessarily a guarantee of on-screen chemistry, let alone the wit and perception to summon it on the page in the writing process. But Dyer and Brammall capture the exhilarating, painful, confusing frisson of two people realizing they’re into each other perfectly. They’re both just enormously likable, ensuring the most important love affair — between the audience and the characters — is also requited. (They both appear to be successful, jobbing TV actors you have probably heard of if you