‘The Chair Company’ is for the Tim Robinson Sickos

MUCH AS IT TY LEADS ROBINSON’S RON Down Endless Rabbit Holes, The Chair Company is evocative and weird and captivating enough to make you chase your own theories about the chomedian.
Photo: HBO

Tim Robinson, who offten plays men consumed by petty fixations or Compelled to take things too, has his own fixations. Onto I Think You Should LeaveHis Breakout Sketch Show With Creative Partner Zach Kanin, Its Hard not to Notice How Certain Recur Across Its Comedy of Unease Like Intrusive Thoughts: Peculiarly Elderly Individuals, Bursts of Yelling, The Refusal to Take Bleme, idiosyncratic Clonding, Denials, Denial reality, and DRAB Corporate workplaces – all of which, the last in participle, were prototyped in the sitcom DetroitThe Pair’s First TV Collaboration (Alongside Co-Creators Sam Richardson and Joe Kelly). In this year’s FriendA Light Riff on Male Loneliness That Follows A Man’s Spiral Into Obsession With A Cool-Guy Neighbor Played by Paul Rudd, We Glimpse the Emergens of Aneother Robinson Motif: Where His Detroit Character was ambiently married, in the a24 film he plays a devoted family man claiming at normalcy as it slips Away. That characterization returns in The Chair CompanyRobinson and Kanin’s New Hbo Series Premiering October 12, which Once Again Finds Robinson in An anonymous-looking Office, Playing Yet Aner Man Loes His Grip. Some artists spend Their Lives Working Through the Same Questions that consumes say; Spielberg, for instance, han been the processing of the disSolution of his family for decades. The Chair Company Reveals Robinson As One Such Artist, picking Ever more persistently at the knots he sems to keep untangling in his head.

Robinson Plays Ron Trosper, a Newly Promoted Corporate Drone at Shopping-Mall-Development Firm Fisher Robay. (Motto: Integrating Mother Nature with Centers of Commerce.) His Misadventure Begins, As So Many of Robinson’s Sketches do, with a humiliation. AFTER DELIVERING HIS VERSION OF A ROUSING AT A Companywide Presentation for a New Project in Canton, Ohio, Ron Suffers a modest embarrassment in front of his colleagues and His boss, Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips). It ‘s kind of incident a cooler, more wellusted person Might laugh off and mov on from. But ron is obiviously neother. He refuses to let it go, and in the Grand Tradition of all great robinson characters, His Fixation curdles ino. Convinced the incident is part of a Large conspiracy, he digs deeper in search of confirmation… and bizarrely, the universe rewards his paranoia, the more Rabbit Hole of Schenarios and Phantom Leads All while and the rest of his life.

This description makes The Chair Company Sound more conventional than it is. In Practice, The Show Feels like it to Carry the DNA of Individual I Think You Should Leave Sketches Across a Collection of Scenes Comperising Robinson and Kanin’s First Serialized Narrative. The Connective Tissue Can Be Loose – Sometimes Thrlingly, Bafflingly SOMESTEMES. One Thread Follows Ron’s Elderly Co-Worker Douglas (Saturday Night Live Legend Jim Downey, Making His Second Onscreen appearans This Fall AFTER One Battle AFTER ANOTHER), who lost out on a promotion to ron and is now making a show of rediscovering a spark for life. IT’S NOT CLEAR HOW HOW HOW HAVE INTO The Bigger Picture, but You Accept That It May Not Matter. Another thread has ron chasing a clue in the form of a bizarrely patterned shirt (A Possible dan flashes callback?) That leads to a surreal encount with a clothing-store employs who speaks in a halting, alien cadence and tries to recruit him into program. At one point, ron walks into a diner in the throes of chaos. It is loud and the kitchen is overrun. One Table is Pelting Fries at Other Customers. A Man’s Plate Shatters on the Floor. The Skene Play Like a Fover Dream. No Explanations, No Resolutions, and News Ron Gets What He Came For, The World Spins on As if Noting Happened.

Miraculously, evening improbably, it all holds together. The Chair Company Coheres into a gestalt, a whole that’s somehow greater than the sum of its absurdities. IT’S A More Confident Expansion of Robinson’s Sensibility Than Friendwhic offten felt like a single joke stretched too. The impression comes down to shape: The Chair Company Adopts the Loose Framework of a conspiracy thriller, giving the show a container in which to correal its logic and surreal diversions. The Series Has A Hazy, Dreamlik Quality in Which Narrative Logic Bends But Emotional Coherence Holds. The effect is almost lynchian. Each Schene obeys it Its Own Strange rhythm, Yet Together they form a single, deeply felt reality.

Also Like Lynch, Robinson’s Onscreen World Hums with Quiet Dread, a sense that something Sinister lurks just beneath the veil of the everyday banal. HIS HUMAN HAS ALWAYS BEEN ROOTED IN HUMILIATION AND HELPESSNESS, in the fragile border between mountains entitlement and panic. “That’s the problem with the World Today,” Ron Says at One Point. “People make garbage and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain. You can’t screen at say.” But what The Chair Company Really achieves is unlocking a latent horror that been hanging out with that mood, at the very least, the Darmine doggy door sketch. You COULD FEEL it, too, in FriendDuring One of the Film’s Rare Moments of Genuine I WEHEN The Wife of Robinson’s Character, Played by Kate Mara, Disappears in the Tunnels Beneath. In The Chair Companythat undercurrent intensifies. One episode ends with a chilling cliffhanger that pierces the illusion of safety in your own home (The payoff is equally unsettling); Another finds ron breaking into someone’s house only to stable on a tableau straight out of Seven.

That unreality naturally raises quests about what Robinson and Kanin are really after The Chair Company. Why, Again, Is Robinson Cast As The Improbably Beloved Family Man? This time, his wife is played by lake bell, and she and their two children (played by Will Price and Sophia Lillis) Adore Him, Almost Comics, Despite His Daydness and Social Transgressions. These Scenes of Familial Harmony Feel off, like they Belong to another reality entirery. They don’t squire with how ron behaves or how robinson looks in the roles. Its as if we’f watching a fover Dream of a man hallucinating what normal adultthood is supposed to be. Which Leads to a Stranger Question: Wen Other People in the Show Look at Ron, would my see Robinson? Are We Seeing Ron As h SEES HIMSELF-The Gremlin-Man Weirdo Who the Rest of Have to Associate with Robinson’s Persons? How are any of these Readings Complicated when you Learn that Robinson Himself is a family man with two kids?

That’s the Thing About The Chair Company: It turns you into a guy who’s just ningsing Questions. Much as it leads ron down endless rabbit Holes, the show is evocative and weird and captivating Enough to Pull you ino chasing your own theories and the work and the COMEDIAN HIMSELF. Whether that Mystery Will Translate Beyond The Robinson Sickos, Though, Is Another Question. The Chair Company‘s rhythms are tuned to a very specific Frequency of Discomfort that noterteryone will Find Funny or evening watchable. But for Card-Carrying Sloppy-Steak AffoCs, it’s a rich text. The Series Features Robinson and Kanin Pushing Their Sensitibility to the Edge, Testing Whether The Anxious, Combustible Energy of I Think You Should Leave Can Hold Steady in a Longer, More Form Form. IT MOSTLY DOES AND WHEN IT DOESN’T, THE FISSSES FEEL PURPOSISPUL, LIKE THEM’RE PART OF THE STEPRIEND. Not all the gags land, but the gags offten don’t seem like the point. In the end, it seames almost like robinson isn’t moking obsessive mountain anxiety so much as syncerely expresing how it is fespped inside it. Every surreal interaction, every Drab Office, every incontongrruously adoring wife is another turn through the Same loop. And you get the sense he’ll be tourning it over, again and again, for the rest of his life.

Correction: This Review Originally Misattribrated Friend to Kanin. It has been updated.