Many are called, few are chosen. In recent years, we've seen a good handful of series and films striving to take the romantic comedy throne left vacant by Nora Ephron's involuntary exit from life in 2012. Who wouldn't be surprised in this genre, Billy? Wilder's way with Lubitsch: How would Nora do that?
The latest candidate to reach our televisions is Colin de Beads, an Australian production from 2022, the first two episodes of which can already be seen on Movistar+. A comedy from writers and actors Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dryer, an off-screen couple and protagonists of this fiction that begins with a crazy trigger. If in “Catastrophe” the protagonists were united by an unforeseen pregnancy, in Colin of Accounts the glue is an adorable dog – how much have dogs done for audiovisual couples since “Dinner of the Defendants” –. A dog he runs over after he becomes distracted when she spontaneously decides to show him a nipple – a variation on Estopa's “The Slit in Your Skirt” made into a narrative premise. References to Ephron can even be found explicitly in this series. He quotes “When Harry Met Sally” and she thinks he’s talking about two of his friends.
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Colin is rude, funny, and tries to sound like Nora Ephron. But it's not Nora Ephron. That's what good references are: they act as a horizon, but as such you never reach them, and it's better not to live on them alone.
We're seeing more and more series written by romantic couples. At Club Dryer and Brammall there are also the Sherman Palladinos, the Kings or the Javis, to name just other examples, a situation that Episodes presents with grace. Like so many others, I would have liked to have seen it narrated by Nora Ephron.
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