The Chair Company review: comedy and conspiracy in corporate America

Tim Robinson is having a cracker of a year. From the strange delights of A24’s Friendship, where he starred with Hollywood heavyweight Paul Rudd, to HBO’s new absurd office thriller The Chair Company, he’s ensured himself a lifetime of always being ‘that guy’.

Who is ‘that guy’, you ask? He’s a man with an outwardly norm-core appearance, often wearing a grimace or slack-jawed expression. He is always ready to pick a bone or two with society and its absurdities but in doing so, reveals himself to be society’s most absurd member of all.

That’s the Tim Robinson we’ve come to know and love, starting way back with his Saturday Night Live appearances to Netflix’s cult sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave. I’ll admit I have no idea what Robinson is like in real life but as far as his onscreen persona goes, a lean into ‘that guy’ is always guaranteed, and so are the laughs that follow.

In The Chair Company, ‘that guy’ is William Ronald Trosper, a man working at a design and architecture firm who finds himself in an embarrassing situation after a very public work accident. Pushed by anger and shame after the incident, he seeks a satisfying explanation why it happened and why to him. This leads him down a conspiracy rabbit-hole that quickly becomes deeper than he could have imagined.

Faced with returning to an average suit-and-tie life behind a desk, Trosper becomes obsessed with the idea of a chair company pulling the strings behind anything and everything in the world and we are haplessly pulled into the madness with him.

Watch the trailer for The Chair Company

The chair conspiracy

Balancing a fine line between stupid and clever, The Chair Company stands out among the usual HBO programming for taking bold risks and crafting a story both so insanely silly and mysteriously compelling that each episode leaves me reeling with a ‘what?!‘

The seemingly normal but humiliating work accident spirals into a conspiracy so large and multi-faceted that it rivals the best spy dramas out there – The Manchurian Candidate, North by Northwest and Three Days of the Condor come to mind – but the point of difference is that each thread reveals a character more hilariously absurd than the last.

Mike Santini (Joseph Tudisco) is a thug who warns Trosper to drop the search in episode one – and hammers home the point by hammering in Trosper’s head – but quickly changes his mind when they realise the whole damn thing is bigger than either of them. This is the unreliable narrator’s unreliable narrator. He lives in a cockroach-infested apartment where neighbours scream ghoulishly through the walls 24/7 and his idea of entertainment is bizarre. His flights of fancy make Trosper’s seem pedestrian,

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The further along we go, the more Lynchian everything becomes, from strange characters hiding in coat cupboards, to stilted conversations with shirt salesmen that seem to be alluding to something else (but to what remains open). And just like when I watch a Lynch film, I’m not sure whether to laugh or be totally terrified.

Chaplin and The Chair Company

The Chair Company is absurd, it’s infuriating and it’s fascinating.

Showrunner Andrew DeYoung, who also directed Friendship, has tapped into a particularly bizarre modern feeling: the one that we feel whenever we have an argument about a complicated return policy or are tasked with doing a job for an obfuscated or bewildering purpose. Having worked with Robinson already for some time, he clearly gets the guy’s whole deal and uses it superbly.

ScreenHub: Friendship review: if your love is strong, gonna give my all to you

Like Charlie Chaplin donning the bowler hat and vest to play The Tramp in countless shorts and feature films, Tim Robinson plays ‘that guy’ or some version of him in nearly everything that he does. Far from flogging a dead horse, the shtick works, just like Chaplin’s did, because it responds to something in our wider culture and gives us an outlet to process it.

For Chaplin, The Tramp was a response to the Great Depression, a time marked by intense poverty and the endless search for the next dollar, which made the difference between eating chicken or a shoe. For Robinson, ‘that guy’ evolved directly out of late stage capitalism.

He’s a suburban-dwelling, corporate cog in the machine – one who has the constant, insanity-inducing feeling that something very wrong is going on but frustratingly lacks the charisma and camaraderie with his fellow citizens to do anything meaningful about it.

He makes baffling choices but he remains relatable. Who amongst us hasn’t recently felt the crushing realisation that the world may be going to hell in a handbasket, while simultaneously being so isolated from the world to spring into action?

The Chair Company is streaming on HBO Max from 13 October.

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