<\/p>\n
I spend most of my day at work looking at a computer screen. I\u2019m doing it right now as I write this. I dodge out a couple of times per week to stand in front of a roomful of students, but the majority of what I do involves sitting hunched over in a chair in front of my desk gazing into the maw of Microsoft Word or Gmail or Zoom or some infernal software as a service like the aptly named Workday. Most of the time, mercifully, when I\u2019m able to log off, I greet it as a relief. My eyes readjust to the world around me, my attention no longer governed by the spelunker\u2019s logic of the internet, the mere sight of other people filling me with a sense of community and communion. But sometimes, of course, the transition makes me crabby. Sometimes, if you spend most of your day isolated by a screen, dealing mostly with the online avatars of colleagues or clients or students rather than the actual people themselves, it can be easy to bristle at the thought of a staff meeting or a class or even a school pickup. Like a deep-sea diver who ascends too quickly, you find it hard to repressurize to life back on the surface.<\/p>\n
TV has long occupied itself with depicting this particular work-life form of the bends. Every workplace series, from The Mary Tyler Moore Show<\/em> to Mad Men,<\/em> has had to negotiate some relationship between the eight hours for work and the eight hours for what we will. Some current<\/a> shows, like The Paper,<\/em> Peacock\u2019s new spin-off of The Office, <\/em>take the tried-and-true route of merging life with the workplace, making it an ecosystem so warm and all-consuming that there\u2019s no reason to look away. On the other side of things, Apple TV\u2019s Severance<\/em> emphasizes the divide, dramatizing characters whose lives are split at best and annihilated at worst by the inability to reconcile the rituals of the office and the home.<\/p>\n I think the best workplace series on the air right now is I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson<\/a>, <\/em>the madcap Netflix sketch show created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin. In their workplace skits, the office is always a place of strange chaos and discomfort. The conference table is a cursed altar, your co-workers hide oceans of rage beneath their shirt collars, every office party is a danger zone. Lunatics risk their lives to eat hot dogs during meetings, work trips become descents into madness, playing a flash-animated game on your work computer is like unlocking the seventh seal.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no time to be captivated by the unstable workplace ecosystem of I Think You Should Leave <\/em>as Robinson and Kanin briskly shuffle us in and out of it. But their new show, HBO\u2019s The Chair Company<\/a>,<\/em> brings this vision of the corporate uncanny to long-form serial TV. You won\u2019t find yourself shipping any of the show\u2019s couples or even thinking that hard about its central mystery, but, somewhat improbably, The Chair Company<\/em> manages to be both a high-surrealist critique of the dehumanization of work and a portrait of fragile humanity. You won\u2019t get swept away by its narrative or its cast of characters, but you might find yourself, unaccountably, moved.<\/p>\n The plot of The Chair Company<\/em> is nuts. Ron Trosper (Robinson) is a middle-aged middle manager who\u2019s been put in charge of building a new shopping mall in Canton, Ohio, and, as the show begins, things are looking up. He is out to dinner with his family\u2014his lovely and ambitious wife, Barb (Lake Bell), and two grown-up kids\u2014to celebrate the start of construction. As Barb toasts Ron\u2019s success, a young server interrupts to fawn over their son, Seth (Will Price), a star athlete. Seth graciously redirects the attention to his dad and his big news, only for the server to claim that she\u2019s never even been to a mall. It\u2019s a classic Robinson-Kanin social trap. On one hand, it\u2019s preposterous\u2014and even a little rude\u2014for the server to say that in this particular setting. On the other hand, any response Ron gives, aside from a gentle shrug, is an inappropriate one. He tries to lightly correct her. The way many contemporary malls are designed<\/a>, he says, it\u2019s entirely possible to be in<\/em> a mall without realizing you\u2019re in a mall.<\/em> But she insists, and Ron starts to argue with her. A nice moment for Ron, ruined\u2014kind of by somebody else, but also by Ron himself.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important that this happens so early, because the mortifying inciting incident of The Chair Company<\/em>\u2014a chair collapses under Ron onstage at the kickoff event for the new mall\u2014might later seem to be the catalyst for all the mania and violence that follows. But the restaurant scene shows that Ron was always like this. The unraveling that we witness was already happening, and his crisis has been ongoing.<\/p>\n The chair snafu occurs shortly afterward, and Ron begins a ceaseless investigation to uncover the vast conspiracy he assumes is behind his moment of (quite mild) public humiliation. Why a massive network of corporations and malevolent individuals might have enacted a byzantine scheme to essentially do a prank on him is never questioned. The \u201cwhy\u201d of it all, Trosper believes, will eventually be revealed. In other words, there\u2019s a kind of purity to his conspiracy logic. It\u2019s a malevolent scheme he\u2019s imagined almost entirely, and yet, the deeper he gets, the realer it seems.<\/p>\n What follows owes a lot to the sketch-structure of I Think You Should Leave.<\/em> As we follow Ron on his quest, he moves in and out of the same sorts of breathless comic situations we know from his prior work. We encounter a giant red bouncy ball in an empty warehouse, a hired goon who listens to pornos on his car radio as if they\u2019re podcasts, a guy with a dent in his head who aggressively tries to make Ron lick soup off of his elbow, a group of middle-aged men who break into the mall construction site to race remote control cars, a woman who thinks there\u2019s a powerful magnet in her guts\u2014and who might be right.<\/p>\n