Colin from Accounts’ Patrick Brammall goes it alone in TV thriller
Source: Binge
At the inaugural Gotham TV Awards in New York last month, Australian star Patrick Brammall and wife Harriet Dyer took home two prestigious comedy awards for their quirky original series, Colin from Accounts.
“It’s such a home-spun show,” says Canberra-born Brammall of the eight-episode 2022 rom-com, which had already scooped the pool at the AACTAs and Logies in Australia.
Brammall, 48, and Dyer, 35, had their hands all over the series – the second premiered this year – in writing, producing and starring as the on-screen dysfunctional couple who meet after a car accident which leaves Colin, a dog, injured.
Just like Fisk and Deadloch, it had all the Australian-ness needed to appeal and become a global success story.
Season one broke records to become the Foxtel Group’s most-watched original scripted series of all time. It premiered across the world in more than 100 countries, including in Britain on BBC and the US on Paramount+.
Binge says it had a certified fresh score of 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.
The powerhouse couple, who commute between Los Angeles and Australia with their daughter, Joni, who they adopted in 2021, have been mostly inseparable.
That’s all about to change on screen as Brammall has just scored the lead role in a new Apple TV+ series, The Dispatcher.
Set in Australia, the six-episode thriller is an adaptation of American author Ryan David Jahn’s book of the same name.
“My novel, The Dispatcher, is coming to TV,” the author shared on social media, with a photo of Brammall.
Brammall and Dyer met on the set of Paramount+ TV series No Activity in 2016. They married five days after Brammall proposed in 2021.
In September, 2021, Dyer announced on Instagram they had adopted a little girl, naming her Joni.
“With us from her first moments thanks to her incredible birth mother,” she wrote.
Joni is named after Dyer’s grandmother, Joanie, who died six months after the baby was born.
Speaking to Marie Claire in late May ahead of the second series Binge launch of Colin from Accounts, Dyer said “Patty” was an extrovert.
“He walks into a room and he’s charged up and people give him energy. But it’s the opposite for me,” she said.
In the interview, Dyer joked that she and Brammall had spent so much time together she was probably suffering from Stockholm syndrome, before adding that she felt “lucky” they balanced out each other.
“We still laugh a lot and we are also learning to protect our relationship,” she said.
“We want to make good television, but we are learning to put up some boundaries because in the middle of this is our love and … our union … and we can’t keep shopping that out for the sake of a good TV show.”
Crime thriller
In The Dispatcher, Brammall will play police detective Ian Hunt, whose life fell apart 10 years ago when his young daughter Maggie disappeared without a trace.
Now working as a police dispatcher, he is kept going only by his refusal to accept that Maggie might be gone forever.
When he receives a distress call from a young girl he is certain is Maggie, Hunt will stop at nothing to find her and reunite his broken family, whatever the cost.
Published in 2011, Jahn’s The Dispatcher is set in East Texas and features “a bullet-strewn cross-country chase from Texas to California along Interstate 10”, according to Pan Macmillan publishers.
Its “wild ride in a 1965 Mustang that passes through the outlaw territory of No Country for Old Men, and is shot through with moments of macabre violence” will be moved to Australia for the Apple TV series.
