Director Andrew DeYoung (“Friendship”) and “I Think You Should Leave” collaborators Zach Kanin and Tim Robinson continue their exploration of dysfunctional masculinity in the American suburbs in the consistently funny “The Chair Company,” premiering on HBO on Sunday. Like most of their work, it sometimes stretches believability to try and get a laugh, but it’s a captivatingly strange piece of work, a show that feels like it reaches for commentary in a way that these guys haven’t really done before, becoming a study of how paranoia, conspiracies, and feelings of inadequacy can blend into something dangerous in the male psyche. It’s a show that plays alternately like a mystery and a study of a man going insane. It might be both.
The hilariously long tagline for “The Chair Company” kinda says it all while also saying nothing, which is fitting for the show: “There’s a world under the surface and only Ron has any idea about it. And sometimes the two worlds collide, and sometimes they don’t. Ron holds them at arm’s length from each other. Watch every week to find out when he can and when he can’t.”
Ron Trosper (Robinson) works at a company where he’s leading a team planning the construction of a local mall in suburban Ohio. What should be a successful time in Ron’s life is thrown into utter chaos at an office meeting to celebrate the project when, well, something happens that HBO has asked not to be spoiled, which kind of makes the what of this show difficult to unpack. Let’s just say it’s one of those embarrassing moments that can so easily become an object of obsession, the kind of thing that keeps you up at night and allows you to ignore everything else in your life. And it sends Ron down a rabbit hole to “explain” why it happened. We’re often told in life that everything happens for a reason. Ron needs to know the reason.
Robinson understands the kind of guy who focuses on something so much that the stuff that matters, like his job and family, becomes dangerously ignored. The mall project suffers, his kids suffer, his wife suffers, all while Ron is out looking for answers. It’s his best performance to date as Robinson finds layers that the script for “Friendship” didn’t really allow in that he’s allowed to play a more ordinary, relatable guy who happens to be going crazy … maybe.
Countering the constantly twisting mysteries of the show are the scenes between Ron and his daughter Natalie (Sophia Lillis), which are clearly meant to echo a generation of young people who have had to smile and nod at whatever crazy thing their parents have become obsessed with on social media today. While Robinson and Kanin have a habit of pushing their humor into surreal, unbelievable corners of comedy, “The Chair Company” is at its best when it remains tethered to the viral insanity of today, either through Natalie’s or Ron’s eyes. We all have people in our lives who have gone down rabbit holes that allow them to believe something they previously thought impossible (or maybe we’ve done it once or twice ourselves). This guy makes it his entire life.
“The Chair Company” also deftly weaves issues of modern frustration with the way things actually are into Ron’s mental decline. When he screams into a phone about never actually being able to talk to anyone at a company that he needs to reach for his investigation, he’s speaking for millions of us who are tired of automated contact lines and endless hold music. Robinson’s show is at its best when it’s walking that tightrope between its creator’s unmistakably out-there sense of humor and something that feels like it’s about more than just this specific man-child.
There’s an image late in the season that reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” and I realized how much the two projects have in common. They’re both stories of male Alices who plummet into Wonderlands that feel borne from their own insecurities. HBO didn’t send the finale to press, but if Ron ends up at a masked orgy, I may head down a conspiracy rabbit hole of my own.
Seven episodes screened for review. Premieres on HBO on October 12.