[COLUMN] The Chair Company is a Paranoid Comedy About Disconnect | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the plot of The Chair Company, the new comedy series airing on HBO at the moment, up to last week’s episode. It’s great, very much the work of Tim Robinson, a paranoid comedy about social disconnect that feels like an extrapolation of his work to this point. It’s worth checking out. The first six episodes are streaming on HBO Max now.

In the third episode of The Chair Company, William “Ron” Trosper (Tim Robinson) finds himself waiting on hold for what seems like an impossibly long time. Sitting down with Mike Santini (Joseph Tudisco), Ron laments the state of the modern world. “You can’t get a hold of anybody,” he complains. “That’s the problem with the world today. People make garbage, and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain to them, you can’t get an apology. I wanna scream at ’em!”

That is the kernel of truth nestled at the heart of the absurdist paranoid comedy from Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin. Narratively, The Chair Company is built around a fundamentally ridiculous premise. On one of the biggest days of his professional career, Ron suffers an embarrassing mishap on an office chair. This humiliation sends Ron spiraling. It’s a small thing, but – combined with a series of other stressors and a general sense of frustration with his mundane life – it tips him over the edge.

Unable to directly contact the manufacturer and voice his grievances, Ron stumbles across a vast international conspiracy potentially involving opioid smuggling by the shell corporation that operates TECCA, the eponymous chair company. While the season takes various twists and turns and detours, the series is fundamentally about the frustration of not being able to talk to one human being as another in the vast machinery of corporate life, and how – given how much of one’s self is tied up in that machinery - that disconnect inevitably drives a person insane.

The Chair Company is recognizably of a piece with Robinson’s other creative work, most obviously the Netflix sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave and the feature film Friendship, which was written and directed by Andrew DeYoung. Indeed, Friendship and The Chair Company are so closely intertwined in their fascination with a particular kind of middle-aged and middle-class obsession that DeYoung would go on to direct a significant portion of the first season of The Chair Company.

Robinson’s comedy leans very heavily on social anxiety, feeling like something of an offshoot of what might be termed “cringe comedy.” A typical Robinson protagonist will tend to fixate on something minor or take an absurd liberty with some small social grace, pushing a particular liberty to breaking point. Friendship is in large part about how Craig Waterman (Robinson) self-sabotages a nascent friendship with Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd) and struggles to process this.

Friendship and The Chair Company might be classified within the relatively recently blackly comic subgenre of “… are men okay?”, alongside other recent works like The Banshees of Inisherin. In some ways, this feels like a more adult-oriented meditation on “the male loneliness epidemic”, the idea that men find it harder to make friends and social connections, particularly as they get older. They grow organically out of I Think You Should Leave, and its exploration of the fraying social contract.

As much as The Chair Company is about a vast international conspiracy spinning out from an office chair manufacturer, it is also a story about deeply lonely men. Early in the show, Ron discovers his son Seth (Will Price) is drinking alone to relieve his social anxiety. Mike is a very dysfunctional man who has alienated everyone in his life, and who longs for human connection, trying to gatecrash Seth’s birthday party, and who seems to watch nothing but pornography.

Not all dysfunction is as pronounced as it is with Mike. Jeff Levjman (Lou Diamond Phillips), Ron’s boss, also crashes Seth’s birthday when he is thrown into an existential spiral by his own rich friends. Ron’s coworker Douglas (Jim Downey) hosts wildly inappropriate parties for his work colleagues. A kitchen mishap gets Douglas trapped under his own fridge for several days. He is only discovered because Ron eventually dispatches another co-worker (Michael W. Gaines) to look for him.

The Chair Company obviously owes a lot to the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, movies like The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. This is obvious in the show’s visual language, with its fondness for cross dissolves, slow zooms and wide shots. It recalls how The Curse drew from the social horrors of that decade, like The Exorcist. These shows are comedies, but they are also in their own way terrifying. The meaningless absurdity of it all is deeply unsettling.

One of the more interesting aspects of The Chair Company is the way in which the show seems to isolate this strange surreal adult dysfunction as a byproduct of the mechanisms of modern capitalism. It is very appropriate that Ron designs malls, spaces that serve as a unique intersection of capitalism and community in American culture. As the first season begins, Ron has been tasked with overseeing the development of “the Canton Marketplace.”

The mall is not just a physical location that houses stores, but instead has to mean something. The first hurdle comes when Ron makes an off-hand remark in a televised interview that there are currently no plans to have any recognition of Canton’s longstanding history with football at the mall. This prompts public outrage, with one former footballer (Rich Duva) crying on the news, “It’s the history of Canton. It’s ridiculous. Canton is football.”

This outcry causes Jeff to backpedal. “Should we have a little nod to football?” he asks. “It’s obviously important to the community.” Later, after his friend Danny Donoan (Bradley Stryker) lightly mocks him for “building pretty boxes to sell junk to people”, Jeff goes into an existential panic. “What are we trying to say here with this mall?” Jeff asks Ron. Ron replies, “Well, I think we’re trying to say this is a beautiful, smartly designed place where people can go and shop for the most wonderful things.”

Throughout The Chair Company, it feels like every meaningful relationship is defined by capitalism. In the show’s second episode, Ron tries to track down Mike. He does this by figuring out where Mike bought his distinctive shirt. In a sequence that plays like a lab scene in a police procedural, the store clerk (Jared Lindner) points Ron to the distinctive dust and dirt on the shirt. The clerk also convinces Ron to sign up for the stores’ members’ group. Ron is immediately inundated with spam, but spam that is weirdly personal and desperate. “There’s five Rons now,” declares one message. “New blood.”

Even Ron’s marriage to Barb (Lake Bell) is defined by their business interests. It’s revealed that five years before the events of the show, Barb and Ron both quit their jobs to start their own companies. “I like the work, I really do,” Barb laments at one point. “It's just that the people are killing me.” Barb has now devoted herself completely to finding a potential angel investor to help her realize her own corporate vision, away from the people that made her work so unbearable.

Ron’s dream business “Jeep Tours”, which sold an experience “all about trying to be in the moment”, collapsed and Ron was forced to go back to his regular job. When Barb discovers the box of “Jeep Tours” material disturbed in their garage, she confronts him as if he’s having an affair. “Are you starting Jeep Tours again?” she demands. Ron protests defensively, “I can’t have you suspecting I’m doing the Jeep Tours every time I want a cup of wine.”

In the world of The Chair Company, meaning has become commodified. Trying to track down the actors who were photographed as the board of the investment company that owns the chair company, Ron discovers that they were taken at a “Life of the Party” class. “It’s classes I used to take to help you become instantly the life of any party you attend,” explains Oliver Probblo (Alberto Isaac). In this bleak world, the promise of interpersonal connection is packaged and sold.

Even the dynamic between Ron and Mike is financial, despite Mike’s longing for a friend. Ron hires Mike to help him in his investigation, but Mike tries to cross that boundary from professional colleague to personal friend. “I don’t want you to pay me,” Mike states at one point. “I want to do it because it’s the right thing to do. And plus, we’re family, huh?” Ron tries to maintain boundaries. “Yeah, I appreciate that,” he insists. “But I’m gonna keep paying you. I mean, this is your job.”

This tension between personal connection and the vast machinery of capitalism is a recurring fixation for Robinson. Many of the best I Think You Should Leave sketches riff on that friction, with characters defining themselves by branded clothes, crossing lines while trying to make friends in professional tour groups, a focus group that takes a bizarrely person turn, an insider trading case that becomes an airing of personal grievances, a cynic ruthlessly exploiting a nice gesture at a drive-through and even characters who dress like hot dogs driving a hot dog car.

In Friendship, both Craig and Austin define themselves by their purchases. The pair meet when one of Austin’s packages gets delivered to Craig’s house. Austin orders artifacts online, taking pride in owning some of “the first human objects ever made”, packaged and sold online. Craig is fiercely loyal to the novelty company Ocean View Dining, which makes clothes and food. “It’s the only clothes that fit me just right,” he explains to Austin, sounding more like a commercial than a human being.

Late in Friendship, Craig goes on a vision quest to expand his consciousness. “Your mind is about to disintegrate,” explains the clerk (Billy Bryk) selling him the lick of a toad. “You will feel a pain unlike anything you’ve ever felt before, followed by a bliss, which can’t even be described. You will die and be reborn.” All Craig’s imagination can conjure into being is a trip to Subway, where he orders Black Forest ham with a footlong cookie on the side. That is the closest Craig can come to enlightenment.

The Chair Company builds out from I Think You Should Leave and Friendship. It is not simply a show about the absurdity of searching for meaningful purpose or connection within the rigid structures of contemporary capitalism. It is about the impossible of connection when those systems have become so labyrinthine and inhuman. The inciting incident of The Chair Company is Ron’s desire to talk to someone at the company that manufactured a faulty chair, and discovering how impossible that is.

It was never as if this corporate machinery was ever truly human. However, it feels increasingly untethered from humanity in an age of chatbots, virtual phone operators and self-service checkouts. Many larger international corporations like Facebook make it next to impossible to talk directly to a human. This general trend severely reduces the number of human interactions that the average person experiences within a week.

The paradox of all this is that while these trends lead individuals to feel more disconnected then ever, they turn even more strongly towards those same structures in search of interpersonal connection. People’s identities become even more tied up in brands, parasocial relationships become even more all-consuming, and the deep dark rabbit hole of conspiracy theory – with the sweet, soft promise that everything will be made to make sense – grows ever more alluring.

As a man who designs malls, Ron undoubtedly understands that there is nothing new in looking to the structures of capitalism to provide a sense of meaning or community. What happens when those some structures shed even the pretense of humanity?