Earlier this year, I binged an initially-great Australian series called Glitch. It’s high-concept schlock, about a town called Yoorana where people start coming back from the dead. They literally claw their way out the ground, covered in mud, and stagger around like benign zombies. It was really good fun, but in Season 3 it either jumped the shark or I just got bored of new corpses emerging from their graves and groggily roaming, occasionally stealing shirts from clothes lines. Glitch stars Patrick Brammall as the local cop whose unrewarding job is to keep rounding up the town’s undead dead, and I have to admit I thought he was a bit meh. I didn’t hate his performance, but didn’t find it that memorable either. He was just going through the motions, much like a benign zombie.

Anyway, what I’m saying is I wasn’t a particular fan of Patrick Brammall but now I am a fully-fledged convert, because he’s the star of the wonderful Colin from Accounts, and what’s more he wrote it as well, along with his real-life wife and co-star Harriet Dyer. It’s fair to say that together they’ve created an absolute gem, and I would like to make up for my Glitch-bitch with some gushing.

Colin from Accounts is a rom-com that begins with a highly original meet-cute. Gordon (Brammall) is in his car, and stops to let Ashley (Dyer) cross the road. Roused by his courtesy, she briefly exposes her tit to him, whereupon, distracted, he accidentally runs over a runaway border terrier. It’s Boy Meets Girl, Girl Flashes Boy, Boy Cobbles Dog.

I know how dangerous it is to put fictional animals in peril, so want to reassure you that the hound in question is fine. But I can’t, because he’s basically paralysed from the waist down (or, in his case, from the middle along) and is thereafter confined to sweet little canine wheels. A special-needs dog needs a special kind of care, so Gordon and Ashley are bound together by their commitment to his welfare. They name him Colin From Accounts because that’s who he is, or would be, in human form.

Obviously, I love anything with a dog in it, even a smaller breed, and in Colin, Brammall & Dyer have found a star in the making. Border terriers have great personalities, and this one’s placidly enquiring little face wins you over immediately. Add the doggy wheelchair and my heart strings were being tugged like… well, a puppy yanking a rope. Colin’s real name is Zac Fedderson, and I predict great things – one day he’ll win the Palm Dog, you mark my words. BARK my words! OK, I’ll stop.

Ashley temporarily moves in with Gordon because her own place won’t accommodate pets, and thus we have the ideal rom-com-dom close proximity that allows them to fall for each other as they’re falling for the dog. But that would be too straightforward, and this is not a straightforward show. A couple bonding over a disabled pooch could have been saccharine, but this show forgoes schmaltz in favour of zany, off-beat and occasionally barbed humour. The language is pleasingly salty (let’s just say Colin isn’t the only C-word they use), and sometimes Gordon and Ashley are really mean to each other. Ashley’s mother is a horrendous narcissist, her stepfather is deeply creepy, and her friends are nutcases. ‘They’re animals,’ she tells Gordon, who’s keen to ingratiate himself with them. It does not go to plan. Hosting a bunch of self-absorbed millennials in his artisan micro-brewery, the evening descends into chaotic druggy revelry, forcing Gordon to reveal the fuddy-duddy he was trying to disguise. Ashley is over a decade younger than Gordon, and the age difference strains their relationship to breaking point.

What unites them though, is a gorgeously quirky chemistry, which is, I think, more unusual in a real-life husband-and-wife team than you might expect. Brammall is superb as Gordon – a fundamentally decent man who is nonetheless angry, pathetic and a bit of an old fogey. Dyer is perfect as Ashley, a flaky, impulsive but endearing young woman with a gloriously puerile sense of humour - when she flashes Gordon that winning wide smile, it’s more distracting than any brief glimpse of tit.

Their supporting cast are equally watchable. Gordon’s colleagues at the Echo Brewery provide him with an excellent foil, ridiculing his behaviour and giving him robust love life advice, even as they make their own ill-advised moves. Genevieve Hegney is great as Chiara, Gordon’s straight-talking business partner, while Michael Logo is a genial, laidback presence as Brett, who can’t get over Ashley’s boob-flash: ‘It never happens!’

I also love Ashley’s best friend Megan, who is mostly off her own tits on drugs she steals from the hospital they work at. With a deadpan, bone-dry delivery that’s extremely compelling, she’s established as magnetically sexy, a quality that’s put to excellent use in the bacchanalian brewery party scene where everyone gets out of control. Both Chiara and Brett are entranced by ‘Meggles’, but a post-not-coital conversation with her reveals she remembers nothing of their encounters; they mean nothing to her. Their stupefied, let-down silence is a thing of great beauty. It’s a long silence. A soul-destroying, wtf-just-happened, I-want-to-die dumbstruckery that left me desperate to snort with laughter, only I couldn’t, because I didn’t want to ruin that silence; it was too beautiful. Halting the dialogue for so long, just to linger on those discomfited, jolted expressions, was a real treat, showing a creative assurance that runs through the whole series like a lead pulled taut.

Finally, like all great comedy, what elevates Colin from Accounts is the poignancy and heart. Not in a sentimental sense, just in a warm, loving, genuine way. A disturbing visit to a dog shelter as a potential new home for Colin left me weeping and whispering ‘no, no, no’ – get a grip, Morrey, it’s not real and besides, you’ve done far worse, you canine-killing bitch. But Brammall & Dyer (& Fedderson) have created a tight threesome you believe in. You want them to make it work. There’s an enchanting moment at the end of the series where Ashley and Gordon lie in his car (the car that started it all), talking. ‘I think I accidentally opened my heart to a crippled dog, and then you slipped through the opening at the same time,’ Gordon says to her. That’s how it is – not falling in love like a ton of bricks; just waddling in, without functional back legs. You’re rooting for them, warts ‘n’ all, wheels ‘n’ all.

Patrick Brammall went from a death-affirming series to a life-affirming one. It’s clear which he relishes.

• Colin From Accounts, Series 1 – BBC iPlayer