Toby York, ever-stimulating founder of The Accounting Café, posted the following on LinkedIn:

• There’s angst about the state of the #accounting profession.
  
  Firms struggle to recruit, and convincing people of accounting’s purpose and social value is becoming harder. It’s possibly no accident that the profession lacks traction in popular culture. Or maybe its absence in popular culture is the cause.
   
  Lawyers have Suits. Advertising has Mad Men. Vets have, mmm, All Creatures Great and Small? Medics have too many to count, but let’s say Grey’s Anatomy.
   
  This is not just a casual observation. Drama captivates us because it shows social impact and the power dynamics at play. Could accounting, a field too significant to be left solely to accountants, also be a compelling drama if given a chance?
   
  What would be the dramatic narrative?

I’ve said before that I’m not too optimistic that greater visibility in popular culture (or some manifestations of it anyway) would go particularly far in solving the profession’s recruitment and image problems (and at least in Canada, there’s apparently also a shortage of new lawyers, vets and medics), so I have to admit I didn’t give that question much thought. Others did though, yielding a lively selection of suggested narratives, such as:

• A young lad leaves the rural countryside for college in Dublin and a career in the Top 4. Suddenly he returns to the rural life to take over the father’s practice. He goes from dealing with Facebook and Google to shoebox clients and farm accounts. Throw in an old flame who is still living locally and most likely now a primary school teacher for good measure.

• When her father and accounting firm owner Hamish dies, his young accountant daughter Hannah has to take over the company. Follow her as she discovers hidden family secrets and that all is not as it seems in the world of client and personal relationships.

• University, accounting senior lecturer helps interesting student, become a business mogul and philanthropist. 100% Box-office hit, based on a true story.

It’s perhaps significant though that these ideas could all be executed without needing to get very deeply into accounting itself: they might all be set-ups in which we know the characters are accountants primarily because we’re told they are, not because we see much or any accountancy in action. This of course is the crux of the problem: screen lawyers have the advantage that it’s easy to dramatize someone “doing” law, especially in its splashier courtroom-related manifestations; All Creatures Great and Small can always offset wartime separation and strain with a snappily-articulated, visually irresistible subplot about a fatigued cow or a limping dog. In searching for reference points, several commenters cited Ben Affleck’s film The Accountant (I wrote about that here) but that movie is about accounting in the same kind of way that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is about furniture: still, various sources report that a long-delayed sequel is now moving ahead (place your bets on whether or not that digs deeper into technical nuts and bolts). Other cited examples included Margin Call, The Big Short, The Untouchables and The Shawshank Redemption, but this underlines another recurring problem, that someone basing their view of accountancy upon the cinematic evidence would reasonably conclude that accountants are frequently at best shady, at worst outright criminals. By the way, I don’t think anyone referenced Charles Grodin’s pricelessly deadpan work in Midnight Run, as a former mob accountant under the protection of Robert de Niro’s bounty hunter (no one has ever delivered a better soliloquy on the appeal of lyonnaise potatoes). But as I say, his character was on the run from the mob, so doesn’t help the bigger argument.

Accounting, as a discipline, shows up sometimes in movies (in a previous article I cited You and I, Silver Bears, and The Pajama Game), and yet probably nowhere near as often as it should, given how many people actually are accountants of various kinds. But maybe that should be flipped around: the profession may have its difficulties, but has consistently made a lot of people prosperous and satisfied with very little help from popular culture. Looked at that way, at this advanced and complex stage in our evolution, it may be futile to expect much better in the foreseeable future. Best to clean out our own house, to diagnose and tackle the elements that might be making accounting less competitive than it used to be (almost certainly including, as I’ve put it previously, reducing the ever-increasing compliance burden, in which it’s viewed almost as a truism that almost no one reads much of the output which is so expensively laboured over, and where we’re meant to be scandalized by minor audit missteps). Whether or not primetime TV pays any attention (and it probably won’t), the fact of our resurgence and revitalization, and of the related opportunities, will surely find its way into the recruiting spotlight, if it deserves to…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.