Rating: 6/10
Watching “The Chair Company” is not easy. That might not feel like a compelling way to describe a TV comedy, but for those familiar with Tim Robinson, it’s the first sign of success.
That’s because collaborators Robinson and Zach Kanin seize the discomfort in anything they’ve worked on. “Cringe Comedy” has been a subgenre long before these two, but they’ve made significant, amusing additions to the niche. Their previous works, such as the sketch comedy show “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” and the 2024 film “Friendship,” serve as strong examples of their writing when it works best.
“The Chair Company” follows in the same footsteps, though the comedy/thriller genre is a new venture for the writing duo. The show centers on Ron (Robinson), a midwestern businessman who feels humiliated after an incident at work and then gets sucked into trying to solve a senseless conspiracy theory in an attempt to save face.
The show’s first season aired on HBO Max for eight stunningly awkward episodes, and it’s set to return for a second season next year.
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A big part of what makes “The Chair Company” painful to watch is how real everything feels. Ron, as a character, has very realistic wants, obsessions and issues. He’s stuck at a job he doesn’t entirely love but has no reason to leave; his kids don’t really respect him, but they manage to love him; and he repeatedly, constantly, makes a fool out of himself.
All of that is what makes him so vulnerable to falling down the conspiratorial rabbit hole behind the fictional chair company Tecca. As a form of escapism from his mundane life, and in an attempt to redeem himself as some sort of hero to his family, Ron chases red herring after red herring.
“The Chair Company” isn’t interested in offering a rewarding conclusion to this madness and, instead, manages to build an absurd world in which everything is connected but hardly anything makes sense.
Robinson as Ron is a fantastic comedic performance, and the way he portrays his frustrations and almost-delusional hopefulness elevates every scene he’s in. The show is full of countless memorable one-liners and silly moments, and also features some clever setups that pay off in later episodes.
A lot of the show also draws on secondhand embarrassment for comic relief, which ends up working as a joke most of the time. Still, “funny” can be hard to define, and sometimes embarrassing moments don’t earn laughs just because they were embarrassing.
However, the structure of “The Chair Company” is tiring, and with it lies the main flaw of the show. Each episode has a sort of formula to it: the first 20 or so minutes will be the regular story, and then the final couple of minutes will end on an almost useless “twist.”
These reveals weren’t intuitive or foreshadowed at all, and each time they felt like an unnecessarily jarring swerve off course. They ruined the show’s otherwise consistent pace and also made it harder to engage with anything the show revealed.
The ending would’ve felt more rewarding if all these loose ends stayed loose for as long as they could, rather than every episode feeling like a new open-and-shut case.
Although it’s Ron who first gets pulled into all these false leads throughout “The Chair Company,” he isn’t the only weird one in the show. In fact, many of the supporting characters have some very strange personalities that lead to good bits.
Someone who was especially fun to see on TV for the first time was internet personality Grace Reiter as Tara, who may be familiar to some because of her work as a sketch comedian on social media. The entire supporting ensemble helped make the show more immersive and that much more entertaining.
Although a good performance by Joseph Tudisco, the character of Mike Santini just did not work. He accompanies Ron for most of the show in an attempt to take Tecca down and make a name for himself, so he comes up the most often out of all the other side characters.
Yet, he feels the most repetitive with his porn-related “quirks” each time they come up. His presence felt hard to bear, and not in the way that ends in laughs. Deepening, replacing or minimizing his role in the next season would be progress.
“The Chair Company” is a creative new addition to the world of “Cringe Comedy,” and hopefully, it grows more secure with its next season.
