“I Guess I Shouldn’t Have Had That Last Cheez-It This Morning”
Welcome, everyone, to the very first recap in Simpler history! For the uninitiated, I recapped the third and fourth seasons of Succession on my now-defunct (not really, you can still find it) Medium page, and now I’m turning my attention to another Sunday night HBO corporate drama, Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s The Chair Company. If you’ve read this site before, you know I am a Tim Robinson enthusiast. Not only do I find his physicality and singular word-jumbling to be funny beyond words, I also think that his work speaks to a level of late-capitalist alienation and atomization that leaves us rage-filled, brand-obsessed, and incapable of making any sense. Which brings us to The Chair Company.
The pilot, entitled “’Life goes by too f**king fast, it really does.’” starts with an introduction to both the characters and the setting/vibe of the show. A chipper, upper-middle-class family, the Trospers, are out for dinner at the kind of suburban eatery that might be referred to as “the Nice Place”, where you bring relatives visiting from out of town. Patriarch Ron (Robinson) is being celebrated for a promotion at work, where he oversees the design of malls. Malls, Ron informs the waitress, have “changed a lot”, and are “more naturalistic”, with an emphasis on experience rather than just shopping.
Fans of I Think You Should Leave, Robinson and Kanin’s Netflix sketch show, might be reminded here of The Shops at the Creek, a fictional mall that contains the legendary menswear shop Dan Flashes.
Ron’s quirks quickly surface, insisting that he be allowed to take half a deviled egg from dinner home, and yelping to his wife Barb (Lake Bell) at bedtime “I swear, I have the worst pillow in town… this thing is made of goddamn metal!” Unsurprisingly for a Robinson character, Ron is tightly wound, indulging in tantrums over minor details and insisting on being correct.
The next day at work, Ron gives a presentation marking the beginning of a new mall project in Canton, OH. Afterwards, however, all hell breaks loose. Specifically, a chair breaks under Ron, which causes an immediate ruckus among the crowd. While he’s down there, he accidentally sees up the skirt of a coworker. He’s fine, even joking about it, but Ron is clearly shaken.
Now that we’ve seen Ron in crisis, this is where the Robinson/Kanin house style really kicks in. In his embarrassment, Ron hides under his desk, kicking and yelling as his coworkers look for him. He stays late at work, missing his son’s important basketball game and takes pictures of the chair that broke, discovering that it’s made by a company called Tecca.
Attempting to call Tecca, Ron ends up on the line with a company called National Business Solutions who are not Tecca but handles their calls. The Chair Company is ultimately a show about how impossible it is to speak directly with anyone on the phone. At home, Ron tries to engage with a chat bot on Tecca’s site, which he refers to as “a fucker”, then moving to email, which bounces back immediately.
The next day in the office, Ron learns that a recall could be possible if there’s proof of the chair being dangerous, so he decides to take advantage of the feebleness of Doris, an elderly coworker whose slow walking he complained about at the beginning of the episode. His plan fails, thanks to his assistant’s poor choice of snacks (as a result, Doris never left her chair). Ron flies off the handle, yanking a bubble necklace off his newly laid-back coworker Douglas’ (played by longtime SNL writer and One Battle After Another breakout Jim Downey) neck.
Between the necklace incident and the accidental upskirt, Ron starts to feel as if HR is coming for him, so he escapes from the office. At home, as he prepares a slideshow for his daughter’s wedding, Ron listens to Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” on YouTube, commiserating about the passage of time with people in the comments.
But then, in the background of a picture in his iPhoto, Ron sees a Tecca chair, zooms in and finds an address for Tecca headquarters. With a spring in his step, Ron pops that half-a-deviled egg in his mouth and drives down to the Tecca offices. When he arrives, he finds an abandoned office with hardcore porn in the copier and a big red ball on the floor. All of a sudden, his guts go nuts from the egg and he heads to the bathroom. While using the bathroom, he hears someone come in, stuffs some toilet paper down the back of his pants, and runs off.
The next day at work, Ron gets called into HR. Despite his anxieties, it turns out that Ron’s delay in hiring a new security firm for the construction site is the issue. Some teens were caught drinking with a (shirtless) teacher at the site, and that’s now the company’s liability. We learn a bit about Ron‘s life here, specifically that he left his job and tried to start an adventure tours company in his backyard, but only managed to get “one rope bridge out in the woods” together. Despite all of this, the company believes in him, and he decides to forge ahead with his life, untroubled by distractions.
Ron chipperly deletes the Tecca picture from his phone and heads out, only to be chased down by a man screaming “stop looking into the chair company” who hits him in the face. Ron gives chase, and the man expertly unbuttons his shirt, slipping out of it as Ron grabs it, disappearing into the night.
That’s the pilot of The Chair Company. It’s a pleasure to see so many hallmarks of Robinson and Kanin’s style here, from the Coffin Flop-esque chair break sequence to the regular weirdos who populate the show’s world. Ron, like many of Robinson’s everymen, is a weird guy who tries his hardest to be normal, but his bullshit job has broken his brain. I suspect that the coming episodes of The Chair Company will introduce us to kindred spirits. What will Ron find at the center of this mystery? I don’t know. But we’ll find out together.
Some of my favorite bits:
Ron insisting that the restaurant is actually like a mall because “because there’s shops around and the parking lot wraps around”.
Wiping the bubbles off of Doris’ hair with copy paper.
The Twin Peaks-level eeriness of the maintenance man who is extremely concerned about whether or not his wheelbarrow has been outside or not.
Ron’s insistence on saving the half-a-deviled egg, and what it does to him. I’m a simple man.
What do you think we will see in The Chair Company? Let me know! See you next week!
