‘Colin from Accounts’ Makes a Men’s Rights Concert Even Cringier with Original Songs

The beauty of a show receiving a second season is seeing how the writers — having firmly established their characters and world — broaden the show to encompass more. Some shows falter; “Colin from Accounts” soared.

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Nowhere is that better expressed than in the plotlines concocted for the friends and family of Gordon (co-creator Patrick Brammall) and Ashley (co-creator Harriet Dyer), both of whom have the requisite oddballs in their lives who, in typical “Colin from Accounts” fashion, are tweaked just enough to be both over-the-top and recognizably human. If Ashley’s mother, Lynelle (Helen Thomson), served as a foil to her daughter (and a symbol of how Ashley became who she is) in Season 1, she gets a truly wild plot in Season 2 that allows both character and actor to step into the spotlight. Literally, when Lynelle takes centerstage for the Episode 7 benefit for Women Against Women Against Men (WAWAM for short), a men’s rights advocacy group.

Initially called Honey Badgers until someone pointed out to Brammall and Dyer that an Australian celebrity boasts that as a nickname, WAWAM began to take shape the way most things do: exhaustive Google searches.

“That was a funny one where we were looking up men’s rights activism,” Dyer told IndieWire. “We have a really colorful Google history when we’re writing this show.”

“We have to smash our computers at the end of every season,” Brammall added.

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After landing on WAWAM (“It just came out of our little fluffy heads,” Dyer said), the duo started assembling a songlist for the concert. Until someone else pointed out that the music rights to “Stand by Your Man” and “My Guy,” among others, would completely blow the budget. “And so then Patty and I wrote the songs,” Dyer said.

Aiming for the kind of country song that Tammy Wynette made a career out of, Dyer said they “just sat there on a Saturday morning, and I can’t remember who [came up with it], but it’s, ‘A woman without a man is just whoa, whoa.’ ‘We wrote it together, and I was a real music nerd in high school and know my way around some chords and songwriting. So I put it to a bit of a bing-bong, and then we sent it to our composer-composer, and he built the full backing track.” Watch the performance in the video above.

The song (and the soprano trilling “I’m triggered, I’m triggered / Don’t smile at me / It makes me feel unsafe / I’m a victim, I’m a victim,” a “Patty special,” Dyer said) is equally absurd and believable; for the performers on stage, men’s rights are no laughing matter, and watching the audience applauding makes us squirm just as much as it does Ashley as she realizes the full extent of her mother’s latest project. The episode is another reminder of what “Colin from Accounts” does so well: revel in absurdity with absolute seriousness. Now where’s the EP?

“Colin from Accounts” is now streaming on Paramount+.