The Chair Company (HBO)
Tim Robinson turns an 'I Think You Should Leave' sketch into a full-blown Lynchian nightmare
What is it? Follows a man who investigates a conspiracy after an embarrassing incident at work.
Watch if you like: Friendship, I Think You Should Leave, Lost Highway, Severance, The Office
Schmear’s Verdict: Tim Robinson turns workplace humiliation into existential horror with The Chair Company, a deliriously funny and unsettling descent into ego, embarrassment, and the absurd.
What if an ill-timed pratfall took on cosmic proportions of consequence? That’s the setup of Tim Robinson’s new series, The Chair Company, about a real estate executive in Ohio who, during a big presentation, eats shit in front of all his colleagues.
It’s an I Think You Should Leave sketch stretched into a full-length series—an idea that may grate on some but will delight many. Robinson remains a modern-day expert at dissecting male ego and insecurity under late-stage capitalism through absurdist, surrealist comedy.
He’s the master of the spiral-out, and this time his character wages a holy war against Tecca, the titular chair company, leading him down an increasingly bizarre rabbit hole. The series shares The Office’s fascination with workplace humiliation, Severance’s eerie corporate surrealism, and even DNA with David Lynch’s Lost Highway in terms of the emasculating k-hole fugue state the series can enter.
Jim Downey, memorable from One Battle After Another, is hilarious here, but The Chair Company belongs to Robinson—his estranged brand of humor and his ability to access real emotion through ridiculousness, not unlike Adam Sandler, particularly his Barry Egan character in Punch-Drunk Love.
In the first episode, as Robinson’s character watches a slideshow of his family while Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” plays, you’re unexpectedly moved—and weirded out by how hard it hits. This will then be accompanied by the most cock-eyed, spit-take interaction or joke fathomable, keeping you off-kilter consistently.
This isn’t new for Robinson, who evoked similar feelings in Friendship, another seemingly silly work that reached deep, dark places. The Chair Company is a phone-off, lights-down kind of show—if you’re not fully tuned to its wavelength, you might feel bored or whiplashed. But if you give yourself over, the rewards are plentiful.
