Initially, the buzz around Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company didn’t lure me; given my prickly reaction to Friendship, I figured he just wasn’t my cup of joe. But this black-comedy conspiracy thriller’s erratic, perverse left turns grew surprisingly addictive, delivering a consistently startling narrative journey. Robinson stars as Ron Trosper, an Ohio real estate developer on the verge of a crowning achievement: the building a new shopping mall. Delivering a speech about the project looks to be a major moment in the spotlight, but his thunder is stolen when — after successfully winning over the room — the chair he sits on collapses. By rights a momentary humiliation, Ron can’t let it go, and indignant with embarrassment he attempts to reach the company that made the chair to register a complaint. What starts as a frustrating customer-service experience, however, escalates into a full-blown investigation into the chair company, which turns out to be the tip of the iceberg of a massive conspiracy.
As in Friendship, Robinson’s cringey character initially raised a few hackles, as did the script’s crass humor and hysterical outbursts. But soon enough there’s a clever cumulative effect to The Chair Company’s unpredictable nonsense. It takes the tropey substance of the conspiracy thriller, but steeps it in the infuriating day-to-day indignities of the modern world. As such, Ron’s struggle pits him as both the antihero investigator (think Joe Frady in The Parallax View) and the beleaguered everyman chafing against the unforgiving infrastructure of society (such as Sam Lowry in Brazil). The combination of twisty thriller plotting plays nicely with the sketch-comedy surprise of each bizarre encounter, proving — kind of like Burn After Reading does — that the super-serious, high-stakes tone of the conspiracy thriller is absolutely ripe for heightened satirization. In the process, Robinson and company take the piss out of American life, a layer of scathing commentary about everything from customer service to office politics to government corruption to tech enshittification. Lake Bell and Sophia Lillis provide the most professional support as Ron’s wife and daughter, respectively, but the best comedy comes from players like James Downey, Jared Lindner, Glo Tavarez, and Joseph Tudisco, who bring the delightfully peculiar characterizations that give the show its deeply quirky tone. It definitely has off-putting characteristics, by turns annoying, ugly, profane, histrionic, and perverted, all of which are likely to repel viewers. But those unfortunate ingredients are also key to the spirit of its underlying critique. This is the world we’ve built, it suggests, which is why — like the chair — it’s inexorably falling apart. The final verdict: I’m glad I fought through those early reservations, because this show is uniquely brilliant.
