‘The Chair Company’ Review: Tim Robinson Brings His Delightfully Unhinged Vibe to HBO

In the very first sketch of his cult hit comedy series, I Think You Should Leave, Tim Robinson plays a man faced with a problem so trivial it’s not really a problem at all: He pulls on a door that’s meant to be pushed. Rather than change course, however, he digs in his heels. He insists the door swings both ways. He tugs until he’s drooling from the exertion. He eventually breaks the hinge entirely. In trying to save himself the fleeting discomfort of admitting he was wrong, he humiliates himself in far more spectacular fashion.

That refusal to let anything go, ever, that tendency to double down to the point of self-destruction over the dumbest shit imaginable, is a central pillar of Robinson’s comic persona. In this summer’s Friendship, about a man who grows obsessed with his neighbor, he and director Andrew DeYoung stretched the punchline to feature length. Now The Chair Company, on HBO, expands it even further, to eight half-hour installments. As with the rest of Robinson’s oeuvre, it’s a purposely uncomfortable experience, as likely to make you squirm as laugh. But those already turned onto his brand of weirdness are in for a bracing ride.

The comedy-thriller, co-created by I Think You Should Leave’s Zach Kanin and directed in the premiere by DeYoung, begins, as so many Tim Robinson plotlines do, with a small but embarrassing mishap at the office. I’ve been asked not to divulge the details here, but suffice it to say it’s the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, that most people might vent about to their loved ones later that evening and forget all about by next week.

William Ronald Trosper, however, is not most people. “Ron,” as he’s usually called, is a Tim Robinson creation. So while he tries at first to brush it off with a joke, it’s immediately obvious that Ron is never going to get over it. Desperate to prove he’s anything but a fool, he convinces himself that he’s the victim of a grand conspiracy, and then the hero who’s finally going to bring it all into the light.

It is at this point that you might be tempted to compare The Chair Company to the larger state of the world, and you wouldn’t be wrong to do so. Ron is a middle-class, middle-aged white man so thin-skinned he’ll destroy his own life in search of someone, anyone, else to blame for his own misfortunes or mistakes. The need to see himself as righteous and respected is so overwhelming that he’ll neglect his mostly fine reality for a dark and twisted fantasy. He’s not unlike a lot of people who’ve been in the news lately.

But while Ron’s anger may be directed outward, it pierces inward; his actions frustrate his colleagues and worry his family — which include wife Barb (Lake Bell), son Seth (Will Price) and daughter Natalie (Sophia Lillis) — but they only ever truly harm himself. Positioned this way, he’s less a threatening anomaly than a funhouse reflection of the impulses and insecurities buried within all of us. Who among us hasn’t fantasized in the shower about exacting elaborate revenge for petty upsets, or lain awake trying to reframe our humiliations as epic tales of triumph?

Besides, though Ron’s behavior is extreme, it isn’t unique. His reality, a few degrees drabber but also stranger than ours, is one populated by socially awkward nerds taking “life of the party” classes, an acting coach who squats in a student’s spare room, a henchman (Joseph Tudisco’s Mike) whose favorite pastime is listening to two men scream X-rated obscenities at each other on the radio. Even folks who seem to have it all together, like Ron’s slick CEO Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips), only ever seem one twinge of embarrassment away from falling off the deep end.

The difference between Ron and most of us is that in this case, he’s right. There really is something going on, which feels a bit like if the Hot Dog Guy actually did manage to find the guy who did this. As Ron starts tracking down leads and paper trails — increasingly neglecting both his job and his family to do so — he finds himself hounded by eerie coincidences, and stymied by forces as menacing as armed thugs and as mundane as unreasonable customer service hold times.

What these clues ultimately add up to is unclear, as of the seven half-hours sent to critics, and probably irrelevant. The conspiracy is murky and convoluted enough that I could only sort of explain it to you even now, and the stakes so vague it barely seems worth the effort. But it functions beautifully as a vehicle for throwing Ron into all manner of absurd situations, from nonsensical arguments to confused fisticuffs. As in Robinson’s other works, what elevates them from amusing to sublime is the way they’re performed, often by unfamiliar but wonderfully offbeat character actors — through overly broad smiles, wild-eyed smirks, strange pronunciations.

It feels sometimes as if everyone is an alien wearing a skin suit and trying to mimic human behavior, with varying degrees of success. I mean that specifically about the show, but I’d be lying if I said I’d never felt that about myself or the world around me — and therein lies the draw of The Chair Company. The cringing mortifications and unsettling unreality make the series a tough sit. But for those tuned into the peculiar wavelength put out by Robinson and his collaborators, they’re also what make it irresistible. Ron and his show are the embodiment of an intrusive thought: the thing you can’t seem to shake no matter how silly and absurd you know it is, no matter how much you might wince if you dwell on it too long.