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TV REVIEW
The Chair Company ★★★½
Could a show with as many funny moments as this new eight-part limited series be considered anything but a success? A comic mix of the conspiratorial and the crazed from Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, the partnership behind Netflix’s brain-bending sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, The Chair Company works even when it falls short of its brief. It’s an odd, sometimes unbalanced, production. Which makes sense when you consider that it’s about odd, sometimes unbalanced, people.
Tim Robinson stars as Ron Trosper, an Ohio project manager who flips out, in the comedy The Chair Company.
Wound tight even at a celebratory dinner with his family, Ron Trosper (Robinson) is a project manager at an Ohio mall developer. Ron is a nerdy salaryman – with his glasses and khakis, Robinson looks like the offspring of Bill Gates – committed to his wife Barb (Lake Bell), engaged daughter Natalie (Sophia Lillis), and teenage son Seth (Will Price). But when he suffers a public embarrassment in the office, Ron flips out under his desk and then seethes uncontrollably.
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I Think You Should Leave’s finest sketches are a mix of the excruciating and absurd; they start crazy, catch half a breath, and then escape reason altogether. That same sensibility is present here, even as Ron can’t help digging into a mystery he should let go. Co-workers offer bananas advice with a sincere calm, screw-loose sympathisers appear, and a diner becomes a prison dining hall. But within a narrative that’s giving visual shoutouts to paranoid 1970s thrillers such as Three Days of the Condor, the humour can’t always erupt.
It’s not until the fifth episode, as Ron and an unreliable ally search for answers, that a lengthy sequence really careens out of control. A trip to a bar to meet a budding actor gets weirder by the minute – absolute eyes bulging weird – before a Marx Brothers bar fight acts as an accelerant for three more levels of looniness. But the storytelling doesn’t know to build on that. Too often Ron lies at work and at home because he can’t come clean, enters the irrational, and then carries on.
Sophia Lillis (left) Lake Bell, Will Price and Tim Robinson as the Trosper family in The Chair Company.
Robinson, who has a rubbery face that contorts in exasperation, can lean too far into comic theatricality with his performance, while the narrative doesn’t do enough with how Ron’s family, particularly Bell’s fraying wife, truly view him. But as the quick gags and double-take dementedness pile up, you’re left to wonder if Ron is actually the new normal: the “average” American who surrenders to the irrational and self-obsessed. There are many laugh-out-loud gags in The Chair Company, but that would be the most telling.
