I spend most of my day at work looking at a computer screen. I’m doing it right now as I write this. I dodge out a couple of times per week to stand in front of a roomful of students, but the majority of what I do involves sitting hunched over in a chair in front of my desk gazing into the maw of Microsoft Word or Gmail or Zoom or some infernal software as a service like the aptly named Workday. Most of the time, mercifully, when I’m able to log off, I greet it as a relief. My eyes readjust to the world around me, my attention no longer governed by the spelunker’s logic of the internet, the mere sight of other people filling me with a sense of community and communion. But sometimes, of course, the transition makes me crabby. Sometimes, if you spend most of your day isolated by a screen, dealing mostly with the online avatars of colleagues or clients or students rather than the actual people themselves, it can be easy to bristle at the thought of a staff meeting or a class or even a school pickup. Like a deep-sea diver who ascends too quickly, you find it hard to repressurize to life back on the surface.
TV has long occupied itself with depicting this particular work-life form of the bends. Every workplace series, from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Mad Men, has had to negotiate some relationship between the eight hours for work and the eight hours for what we will. Some current shows, like The Paper, Peacock’s new spin-off of The Office, take the tried-and-true route of merging life with the workplace, making it an ecosystem so warm and all-consuming that there’s no reason to look away. On the other side of things, Apple TV’s Severance emphasizes the divide, dramatizing characters whose lives are split at best and annihilated at worst by the inability to reconcile the rituals of the office and the home.
I think the best workplace series on the air right now is I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson, the madcap Netflix sketch show created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin. In their workplace skits, the office is always a place of strange chaos and discomfort. The conference table is a cursed altar, your co-workers hide oceans of rage beneath their shirt collars, every office party is a danger zone. Lunatics risk their lives to eat hot dogs during meetings, work trips become descents into madness, playing a flash-animated game on your work computer is like unlocking the seventh seal.
There’s no time to be captivated by the unstable workplace ecosystem of I Think You Should Leave as Robinson and Kanin briskly shuffle us in and out of it. But their new show, HBO’s The Chair Company, brings this vision of the corporate uncanny to long-form serial TV. You won’t find yourself shipping any of the show’s couples or even thinking that hard about its central mystery, but, somewhat improbably, The Chair Company manages to be both a high-surrealist critique of the dehumanization of work and a portrait of fragile humanity. You won’t get swept away by its narrative or its cast of characters, but you might find yourself, unaccountably, moved.
The plot of The Chair Company is nuts. Ron Trosper (Robinson) is a middle-aged middle manager who’s been put in charge of building a new shopping mall in Canton, Ohio, and, as the show begins, things are looking up. He is out to dinner with his family—his lovely and ambitious wife, Barb (Lake Bell), and two grown-up kids—to celebrate the start of construction. As Barb toasts Ron’s success, a young server interrupts to fawn over their son, Seth (Will Price), a star athlete. Seth graciously redirects the attention to his dad and his big news, only for the server to claim that she’s never even been to a mall. It’s a classic Robinson-Kanin social trap. On one hand, it’s preposterous—and even a little rude—for the server to say that in this particular setting. On the other hand, any response Ron gives, aside from a gentle shrug, is an inappropriate one. He tries to lightly correct her. The way many contemporary malls are designed, he says, it’s entirely possible to be in a mall without realizing you’re in a mall. But she insists, and Ron starts to argue with her. A nice moment for Ron, ruined—kind of by somebody else, but also by Ron himself.
It’s important that this happens so early, because the mortifying inciting incident of The Chair Company—a chair collapses under Ron onstage at the kickoff event for the new mall—might later seem to be the catalyst for all the mania and violence that follows. But the restaurant scene shows that Ron was always like this. The unraveling that we witness was already happening, and his crisis has been ongoing.
The chair snafu occurs shortly afterward, and Ron begins a ceaseless investigation to uncover the vast conspiracy he assumes is behind his moment of (quite mild) public humiliation. Why a massive network of corporations and malevolent individuals might have enacted a byzantine scheme to essentially do a prank on him is never questioned. The “why” of it all, Trosper believes, will eventually be revealed. In other words, there’s a kind of purity to his conspiracy logic. It’s a malevolent scheme he’s imagined almost entirely, and yet, the deeper he gets, the realer it seems.
What follows owes a lot to the sketch-structure of I Think You Should Leave. As we follow Ron on his quest, he moves in and out of the same sorts of breathless comic situations we know from his prior work. We encounter a giant red bouncy ball in an empty warehouse, a hired goon who listens to pornos on his car radio as if they’re podcasts, a guy with a dent in his head who aggressively tries to make Ron lick soup off of his elbow, a group of middle-aged men who break into the mall construction site to race remote control cars, a woman who thinks there’s a powerful magnet in her guts—and who might be right.
The conspiracy is never really the point. We’re aware pretty early on in The Chair Company that what we’re watching is a guy having a midlife crisis. The displacement or projection or whatever is going on is rendered repeatedly and explicitly in the first episode. Midway through, Ron is up late compiling a slideshow for his daughter’s wedding. He googles “emotional wedding song” and ends up on the YouTube page for Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name.” Tears in his eyes, he leaves a comment: “It really does go by so fucking fast. You think you’re gonna do something with your life and the next thing you know it’s too late.” Ron Trosper is not OK.
That’s the show’s real subject. There might be a corporate conspiracy or there might not. What The Chair Company is really about, though, is a man who will invent circles upon circles of spiraling conspiratorial lore to mask his inability to deal with the way his life has turned out. It’s about his diseased inability to accept the love of his wife and children, his nearly clinical refusal to focus on the demands of his successful career or the baseline requirements of a marriage or even a friendship. Ron Trosper is bent on self-destruction, and the chair conspiracy is just his destructor’s chosen form.
By situating Trosper’s dissolution within the manic office universe Robinson and Kanin have so lovingly designed, they find an insight that transcends the midlife crisis clichés. The story of Ron Trosper losing his mind is ultimately an ordinary one, but the story of a world that’s ready, even optimized, to hasten his descent is not quite so ordinary. The Chair Company isn’t a comedy, and it isn’t a drama. It’s a horror show about a world—institutions, systems, corporations, even entertainment—designed to make it easy for you to go insane. One man gets curious, and, within a half-hour, he’s unraveled. There’s no way he could have done this on his own, no way it could be an accident.
He is aided and abetted, variously, by customer service lines, local government bureaucracy, local news broadcasts, retail shopping, and the internet, oh the internet. We never see Ron Trosper on a social media platform, but he’s absolutely suffering from anxious screen addiction. He’s got his cell phone he uses for research, the burner he stores in an empty water bottle that he uses for texting, and then he’s got his desktop computer, where he burrows associatively down online rabbit holes until he finds evidence suspicious enough to retroactively justify his suspicions. These screens and systems may make us crazy, but it matters to The Chair Company exactly how they make us crazy.
For all this, The Chair Company is not a misanthropic show. Despite all of Ron’s destructive behavior, nearly every episode features some long take of another character looking upon him with kindness, or some heartfelt speech to remind us that, even if Ron feels alone, he simply is not. In one episode, we see a flashback of Ron spiraling as his small business goes up in flames. Unbeknownst to Ron, his wife, Barb, and daughter, Natalie, are watching him through a crack in the door. Barb tells Natalie how important it is for them to support him, to let him know they believe in him. When we flash forward to the present, Natalie offers words of affirmation to her father at the same time she starts to track his iPhone. It’s a gesture of care and an act of unauthorized surveillance, a conspiracy of love.
