‘The Chair Company’ Premiere Recap: Not All That Serious

I think of Tim Robinson’s characters as existing on a spectrum. Yes, they’re all prone to loud, sudden explosions of cartoonish rage or pain, and they’re almost all anxious, insecure weirdos obsessed with proving they’re in on the joke. But there’s a big difference between the affable “chaotic good” Tim Cramblin from Detroiters and the procession of freaks Robinson plays on his sketch show, I Think You Should Leave. And Craig Waterman, the marketing executive from the 2024 film Friendship, took Robinson into new territory with a darker and more pathetic take on the same neurotic type.

If Friendship was Robinson’s first real character study, his mysterious new HBO comedy The Chair Company is the logical next step. Like Craig Waterman, Ron Trosper is a hard worker and a family man, doing his best to project confidence and competence at the office and at home. But unlike Craig, he’s not actually that bad at it at first. For the most part, people seem to respect Ron. He has the adoration of his wife, Barb (Lake Bell), daughter, Natalie (Sophia Lillis), and son, Seth (Will Price). He’s a project lead at Fisher Robay, overseeing an ambitious new mall development in Canton, Ohio, and seems to have the office’s support. After a surprisingly successful speech at the kickoff meeting for Canton Marketplace, though, the other shoe drops. When Ron takes a seat, the chair falls out from under him and breaks, leaving him dazed and sprawled on the floor. That public humiliation is The Chair Company’s inciting incident.

Friendship is the obvious comparison point for the show, especially with Andrew DeYoung directing this premiere and Keegan DeWitt once again contributing a cool, slightly eerie score. But it’s also the third series co-created by Robinson and Zach Kanin, who collaborated on both Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave. There’s a common comic sensibility running through all these projects, an understanding of what people come to a Tim Robinson show to see. Take that argument between Ron and the young server in the opening scene. A celebratory family dinner turns into an embarrassing dispute when Ron bristles at the server insisting she hasn’t been to a mall since she was 14. He takes it as a personal offense, and that’s a common impulse for Ron — he’s also not a fan of his cheerful elderly coworker Douglas (Jim Downey) blowing bubbles everywhere because “life’s just really not all that serious.”

Like most Robinson characters, Ron really cares about fitting in, fearing attention as much as he courts it. The day after the chair incident, he defuses tension at the office by making fun of himself, only to feel uncomfortable as his coworkers revel in the hilarity of the moment. So he travels down the Tecca rabbit hole, desperate to take action against the titular chair company.

Here’s where “Life Goes By Too F**king Fast, It Really Does” settles into surreal conspiracy thriller mode, a feeling I expect to stick around. The Tecca website’s phone number only gets him to National Business Solutions, which refuses to transfer him to the manufacturer. Messaging with a customer service agent doesn’t accomplish anything, and the obscure support email address bounces back. “What the fuck!?” Ron says, comically dumbfounded.

Most of this premiere is about kicking off Ron’s investigation into Tecca, but it’s already interesting to note what the show is and isn’t interested in showing. We really don’t see much of the Trosper family, all things considered; at this juncture, his wife and kids are all (intentionally) archetypes, blandly supportive projections of the traditional fantasy of a loving, stable nuclear family. We know that Seth is looking into colleges, and Ron is continually adding photos and songs to Natalie’s rehearsal dinner slideshow, but that’s about it. The episode prioritizes strange narrative detours over conventional character-building, and I don’t mind that choice for the time being.

Take the hilarious, unnamed janitor character, who shows up twice: first vehemently denying that his “inside wheelbarrow” goes outside, then appearing outside with the wheelbarrow after all. There’s also Ron’s coworker Amanda, who fully understands that he didn’t intentionally look up her skirt while collapsed on the floor, but still feels the need to report it to HR. Everything at work suddenly seems to be unraveling, especially with annoying Douglas blowing bubbles everywhere and distracting Doris when Ron’s trying to get footage to document her hip problem and the risk of an unsafe chair. (Someone on the phone told him Tecca Legal would contact him directly if there’s proof someone could get hurt.)

The premiere does get pretty harrowing toward the end, beginning with Ron’s visit to the fenced-off building at the old Tecca address in Newark, Ohio. He finds some weird nudes in a printer and what looks like … a giant inflated red ball? And then, right when an old deviled egg sends him on a panicked run to the restroom, he hears footsteps and a long scream. It feels like something from Beau Is Afraid. He’s forced to flee before he can even wipe properly.

Back at work, Ron meets with an exec named Brenda and the head of legal for the Canton development. Apparently, teenagers were drinking at the site last night and one of them almost died. Also, a teacher was there, and he was shirtless.

It’s a weird and underexplained scenario, but the issue is enough to get Ron to lock back into his job and set Tecca aside … for a few minutes. When he leaves for the night, a man swiftly follows him across the parking lot and tells him to stop looking into the chair company, beating him with a baton briefly before walking away. The scene doesn’t stop there, though. When Ron gets his bearings, he stands up and runs after his attacker, the chased becoming the chaser. It’s notable that Ron doesn’t pick up the dropped baton to protect himself, nor does he continue the chase after the guy escapes his reach by leaving his unbuttoned shirt behind. He just stops.

At this stage, it’s impossible to tell what all of this will add up to in the long run. (It reminds me of Nathan Fielder’s underrated series The Curse a lot in that way, and in others.) But so far, The Chair Company is as funny and strange and watchable as I hoped — different from anything else Tim Robinson has done, but also recognizably a Tim Robinson project. I don’t know what any of this shit is, and I’m fucking scared.

• “Why the hell are they trying to take that damn thing? They fucking love taking that thing.”

• “I guess I shouldn’t have had that last Cheez-It this morning.”

• Three-way tie for funniest physical comedy moment of the episode: Ron’s panicked spasming in the cramped space beneath his desk; his loud dinner prep; and Douglas patting down Doris’s hair with printer paper to wipe the bubbles off.

• Good background line: While Ron is on the phone eyeing Doris, you can hear her saying, “Oh, fuck! You gave me that paper too hard.”

• “I just think HR should know that you saw up my skirt. On my birthday.”

• Ron leaves an earnest comment on the YouTube video for “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce about thinking you’ll do something with your life, but not. Curious how those deeper fears will play into his Tecca mania.