Comedy Binges: Still Up, Colin from Accounts, What We Do in the Shadows

Do you need some laughs in a variety of accents? Then I've got a slew of great sitcoms to recommend to you, from England, Australia, and...Staten Island.

Still Up: Created by Steve Burge and Natalie Walter, this is a supremely charming little series about two insomniac friends who call each other up late at night to have long chats and go over the day's events or anything else going on in their life. Antonio Thomas and Craig Roberts play Lisa and Danny, and over the course of eight episodes, you will see the two of them get into some funny scrapes and then some bittersweet drama as they have to grapple with some difficult and challenging decisions. It's perhaps a testament to the chemistry that these two actors have that it came as a complete shock to me that we even get an episode about how they first met and became friends; as far as I was concerned, these two had known each other their whole lives.

This show is a gentle little comedy, very sweet, but also funny, with plenty of character growth and development from start to finish. You will like these characters, but also hope they can eventually get out of their own way and get their life back on track. And, spoiler alert, in episode eight, you'll be cheering for them as they do just that.

Colin from Accounts: Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall (who also wrote the show, and are married in real life, a charming fact I just learned!) star in this delightful tale about Ashley and Gordon, two single people who meet when Gordon accidentally runs over a dog because Ashley distracted him on the street. The dog doesn't die, but after they take him to a vet, they have to pay for a significant surgery and now have to take care of this special-needs animal. Gordon is a middle-aged man who owns a brewery, while Ashley is a struggling medical student, and as they get increasingly entangled in each other's lives, much comedy, drama, and yes, even romance, results. 

The tone of this show can veer largely into drama in some episodes, and you're going to be made uncomfortable in the tradition of squirmy British sitcoms everywhere (makes sense that Australians would have a similar sitcom sensibility as their colonizers). But overall, this is a beautiful romantic comedy about two slightly weird people with a lot of baggage who come together in an unexpected fashion. And yes, you need to watch it to find out who Colin from Accounts is.

What We Do in the Shadows: I know I'm late to the party, OK? This show has already been on for five seasons but I only just binged it all last year and am now here to tell the rest of you stragglers to get caught up. If you never saw the original movie by Taika Waititi, this is the story of a bunch of ancient vampires who live together in a house, and have a human familiar who has to provide them with humans to feed on and generally deal with the admin of getting by in the 20th century without getting caught. 

In the TV show, the setting has been moved from New Zealand to the rather comic location of Staten Island, and we have Kayvan Novak, Matt Berry, Natasia Demetriou, and Mark Proksch as the vampires (Kristin Schaal joins in the fun in later seasons), along with Harvey Guillen as their hapless familiar, Guillermo, who keeps laboring under the delusion that he will be turned into a vampire any day now. Every single season of this show is incredible, with the stakes constantly getting raised and the vampire world-building always leading to increasing complications and the introduction of further threats to our merry band of selfish but somehow still lovable protagonists. They always manage to find a fresh take on this tale as old as time, and the shenanigans are always wild and wonderful, whether they're having to deal with other supernatural beings, a bunch of clueless humans, or the endless bureaucracy of the Vampiric Council. So sink your teeth into this show - you'll have a bloody good time.