The Chair Company Finds Solid Ground in the Surreal

The Chair Company  

4 STARS

HBO TV Series 2025  

Created by: Tim Robinson, Zach Kanin 

Starring: Tim Robinson, Lake Bell, Lou Diamond Phillips 

By Ivy Lynn  

The Chair Company opens with Ron (Tim Robinson) trying to convince a young server that his promotion to build a new mall is important work. In average hands, this is a throwaway scene.  But, this is Tim Robinson we’re talking about, who made simple social interactions in shows like I Think You Should Leave & The Detroiters into comedy master classes  

Created by Robinson & Zach Kanin, The Chair Company gives the writers space to deep dive into their manic brand of dark observational humor with excellent results. Many of the writers too weird for places like SNL are now lighting up the comic world.  The series captures the unsettling cognitive dissonance between what was promised for the digital age and what it’s actually like, through the lens of a hyper-fixated, hyper-active Gen X dork. It’s acidic humor without cynicism. It’s broad but isn’t begging for a laugh. It trusts that the humor is the deeper truth hiding in plain sight.                                                                                  

The series truly takes off during the major work announcement the following day that he’s the lead on the new mall.  Ron’s chair completely falls apart on stage, sending him spread eagle in front of his entire company & he accidentally sees up the skirt of Amanada, a co-worker (Amelia Campbell) it turns out he’s known since high school. This leads not only to a human resource investigation to determine if he’s a creep but a spiraling existential crisis for Ron.  He’s back at the company after a truly spectacular and frightening start-up failure and blames his rocky return on the embarrassing chair splat.  Ron decides the best course of action is to verify the chair’s incompetence, reestablishing himself as the powerful leader.  As he begins to investigate online, he stumbles onto the kind of mystery that hasn’t been explored enough in entertainment.  The website for the office chair is a maze of misdirects, designed to keep the truth hidden. The laughs here come from the familiar odd nature of navigating the virtual space when you need actual clear information, where everything is presented as hyper-real while absolutely nothing is.  

His job creates him as a man you want to join on an adventure. He cares about how things are made. Once the threat, now malls are one of the only places left for a little human connection to what we buy.  He states he wants the mall to be as therapeutic as a walk in a forest. He wants to ease people’s fears around disconnection and create an actual space that people love and feel uplifted by in tangible ways. He wants to fulfill the promise of all the positive things a mall can be.  Every physical detail matters. He’s from the time when straight connections were be made, like who made an office chair, and is happy in that world. Basic integrity in the earth bound world gets him up in the morning.  

The Chair Company explores how the selling of the digital age did nothing to build how actual life would feel like in it. Everyone is always talking about how real life isn’t like what’s presented on social media, but it’s the first show to present exactly how it’s different. Instead of a humming peaceful world, the digital age transformed brick and mortars into abandoned tombs full of unnerving clues to something no one can quite track. People who want to know where something actually is from now on have to become very weird about finding it. A person raised to engage physically in the world to understand it suddenly has no actual path to anything real.  We were promised sleek flawless machines that would revolutionize time but instead everything just barely works; our lives spent nursing these forgetful malfunctioning robots just to buy a loaf of bread.  Rather than propelling our lives into blissful ease, we’re tasked with treating digital tech like a toddler we’re just expected to parent. And we’re expected to be fine with it. Rather than a relic who can’t get with the times, Robinson’s obsessive emotional honesty champions the self that’s furious, outraged, and unwilling to play nicely in the face of such disappointment.  His unwavering commitment to the honesty of a moment creates characters at odds with the world around him. But shouldn’t we all be more like Robinson’s characters? Shouldn’t we all be hysterically unsettled by how weird, corrupt and unmoored modern life has become? 

But, as in all Robinson’s work, Ron’s strengths are also his biggest downfall. He leans into the comic spaces that are unsafe, setting up shop in the dark corners most don’t have the courage to explore. The show eases particularly into the world of middle-class Gen X cis white men.  It’s not the same world as the rest of his family. He tries to be a great dad to his two kids  (Sophia Liillis and Will Price) but his sense that the world is going off the rails and he has to fix it distracts him.  As he digs, he begins to receive threats and even fights a hit on him, making the hitman (Joseph Tudisco)  into his partner. While his obsession is causing him to manically tank at work, he enters fully into a world his wife knows nothing about. Barb (Lake Bell), is living a parallel life to him.  Her empowered normalcy holds him together. Without her he’d sink into the abyss the men he encounters are falling into.  She quit her job at the same company to invent a better breast pump for the working mother. Barb is the beneficiary of the women’s rights movements.  She’s empowered to go to therapy and create a life of meaning and purpose.  She can belt out “I’m Every Woman” and actualize it.  How she can improve the world is clear to her – women are now mothers and CEOS and need real world solutions. The clarity of her purpose grounds her in the present. Barb lives in the land of the well-adjusted beside her husband, who does not.  

As the series deepens, it then twists again and becomes something even more interesting. Between monsters and dream guys, there is a very particular kind of GenX white straight guy that Tim is gifted in exploring. Not exactly dangerous but not exactly completely safe either. You can leave your daughter alone with him; he’ll just be distracted by something that’s odd but strangely important. He’s deeply principled; he’s just not self-aware about how he’s going about it all. His HR inquiry into seeing up Amanda’s skirt investigates why #metoo landed more confusing and unsatisfying than it was supposed to. It’s because everyone knows a guy like Ron.  He’s never going to date rape you but he’s still going to weird you out in a completely non-sexual way.  He desperately wants to be a good guy and to have a clear purpose; he just will unnerve everyone getting there. He actually is the hero.  He’s just never “camera ready”. He wasn’t made to live in a split reality- the earth bound and the virtual.  He can’t adjust to the split, and it makes him forever off-center. There’s no one who lives as passionately in the comic gap of that than Tim Robinson.  

A favorite scene of mine is Ron and Barb in bed for the night. With Ron deep in his obsession with the nefarious deeds of an office equipment company that doesn’t seem to even exist, sex isn’t even a thought.  There’s not exactly a problem because he actually is the hero of this story. It’s just that it’s not a sexy problem or a very clear one & he’s not sexy while he’s solving it. No magazine article or sex therapist is really going to solve this one.  Lesser series would approach a sexless mystery by blaming it on the woman, the hero tossing aside a horny scantily clad gal like she just couldn’t understand how serious things were. “No time for that!” was how they kept the hero hot without breaking for a romp. But The Chair Company finds the delicate humor in the truth:  having no “rizz” in a time when male sexuality is being deconstructed is funnier than sloppy story-telling that throws women under the bus. 

Just like the selling of the digital age, modern culture also sells American male greatness as the pinnacle of cool, sexy, sophisticated, and intellectually enviable. The Chair Company, determined to upend interlocking illusions, shines the light on that too. Ron’s boss, Jeff, (Lou Diamond Phillps) & his friends are supposed to glimmer with the sheen of Oceans 11.  Instead, Jeff is fighting with a DJ over his lame karaoke song while his wealthy frenemies parrot nonsensical aggressive platitudes, making Ron actually the more desirable man. As the series goes on, it’s revealed he had a mental breakdown.  His family decided to support his unique way of navigating the world no matter what, giving when he does actually strike gold in his criminal investigation the bittersweet resonance most shows miss. 

I wish David Lynch were alive to see this series.  It’s improv and sketch comedy writers exploring middle class American life through a Lynchian lens. This first season doesn’t tie up anything neatly, daring instead to steer even more surreal the deeper Ron digs. Similar to Lynch, people either worship or loathe Robinson’s work. I find it therapeutic. The dedication to affectionately drilling all the way down on the absurdness of all the weirdness that makes us human is oddly comforting, like someone is responding appropriately to what modern life actually feels like.