The ‘Chair Company’ Finale Was Nuts

This story contains spoilers for The Chair Company, including the season one finale.

It’s been a heady two weeks for fans of Tim Robinson’s tragicomic HBO conspiracy thriller The Chair Company, whose patience was paid off by the season’s two best and wildest final episodes, punctuated by an announcement that the show—an unlikely hit that certainly played like a one-off miniseries lark early on—would return for a second season.

I am an avowed fan of the Tim Robinson experience, but even I couldn’t see this capper to the Detroit comedian’s banner year coming. Robinson is a master at wringing drama and pathos from the seemingly one-note improv prompt of “guy whose anxiety and embarrassment causes him to heighten and steamroll through any and every awkward social situation.” What’s somewhat surprising is just how dynamic this prompt has proven for Robinson, and how resourcefully he’s explored its potential—first in an indie-hit feature film about the strain of suburban loneliness on the American male psyche and the difficulty of making adult male friends in a post-COVID digital age, and then, with The Chair Company (produced with his longtime creative partner, the former SNL writer Zach Kanin) a full-blown streaming series that successfully braids the sensibilities of paranoid-thriller maestro Alan J. Pakula and, yes, David Lynch, into a compulsively-watchable, darkly hilarious show that uses Robinson’s signature Type Of Guy to coherently interrogate the QAnon Internet-poisoned conspiracy brain.

The quintessentially Robinsonian setup could have easily been a three-to-five minute I Think You Should Leave sketch: Ron Trosper, the head of a nuclear family, miraculously married to Lake Bell, getting his first big opportunity at his job as a shopping-mall developer near Columbus Ohio, suffers the humiliation of settling into a chair that buckles and collapses under him after making a presentation on stage in front of a crowd of people. Rather than laugh off the misfortune, he becomes convinced and obsessed with the idea that the incident was more than random circumstance, but the product of a vast conspiracy of corporate and civic corruption—and over the course of eight absurd, frightening, and perversely funny episodes populated by a standard cast of found Robinson-core players that each have their own weird rhythms, he’s proven correct, at the cost of nearly destroying his life.

For a while, the Twitter reactions to the show were predictably mixed, with Robinson’s core fans immediately deeming it brilliant (as did the critics, who were given seven episodes to stream, yielding a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, for whatever that’s worth) and casuals who’d innocently pressed play expecting a traditional 30-minute prestige comedy wondering “What the fuck is this?” However long it may have taken for America to fully embrace the show’s rhythms—it takes a few episodes for the plot to get in gear, then it flies—enough people hung in to make it what HBO somewhat murkily called its “top freshman comedy in platform history.”