The problem with a genius like Tim Robinson is that he’s always been trapped. His previous work—the glorious, screaming chaos of I Think You Should Leave—was a series of small, perfect, explosive sketches, like watching a man repeatedly detonate in a social setting. But with his new HBO series, The Chair Company, co-created with Zach Kanin, Robinson has finally built a world large enough to contain his magnificent style, and the result is a paranoid thriller that is simultaneously one of the funniest and most deeply unpleasant viewing experiences of the decade.
The premise is mundane, and therefore perfect: Ron Trosper is a mild-mannered, middle-management office grunt in suburban Ohio whose big career moment—giving a motivational speech to his colleagues—is derailed when his office chair catastrophically fails beneath him. Most men would stand up, brush off the dust, and file an HR report. Ron Trosper files a grievance against the universe. Convinced the chair's failure, manufactured by the eponymous "Chair Company," was not an accident but a deliberately humiliating act of corporate sabotage, Ron begins a spiral of investigative fury that quickly trades in the banal agony of the office for the genuine existential terror of a sprawling, sinister conspiracy.
This series serves as the definitive canvas for Tim Robinson’s unique performance style, an intensely controlled, yet explosively chaotic form of character work that centers on the tension between a stultified social veneer and the sudden, volcanic eruption of conviction.
The comedy is generated by Robinson's mastery of emotional incongruity. He establishes Ron Trosper with a profoundly recognizable, 21st century sense of mundane, low-grade stress—a character attempting to communicate within the polite, constrained language of the modern office. This meticulous grounding in the flat affect of corporate life is the foundation for the character's subsequent collapse.
This is where Robinson’s unique comedic analysis truly shines. Ron is a walking pressure cooker of righteous but utterly misplaced indignation.
Have you ever gotten so mad at an inanimate object? I don't mean mad over it, because that points toward shifting the anger in another direction; other than the soulless, unspeakable object. I mean genuinely letting that coiled up internal rage that has boiled specifically because of an inanimate object, loose on said inanimate object. And it's strange, because in a way, you attempt to shrink the rage as it exits your mouth, resulting in pulling strange scrunched up faces and throwing parts of your body in the air as you fight yourself and the invisible aura of the object. Well, if you couldn't tell, I have... often.
Ron Trosper is a man whose psyche cannot tolerate the perceived slight of a faulty piece of furniture. When the breaking point arrives, Robinson executes a complete and immediate shift into what can only be described as high-frequency, rhetorical hysteria. His outbursts are not generic fits of rage; they are highly articulate, laser-focused condemnations that pivot on the most trivial detail.
The core of Robinson’s humor is the inability to concede a minuscule, ridiculous point—a concept that, when stretched over eight half-hour episodes, becomes a stunning study in psychological collapse. His outbursts aren't just loud; they are volcanic, high-pitched squawks of existential betrayal that feel earned only by the character, not the situation.
Then there's the additional humor derived from the prestige thriller production playing it completely straight, forcing us to watch a man who seems to be the only character with his head screwed on right, while simultaneously being the most aggressively unhinged. It’s a series that posits: in the modern world of passive aggression, bland corporate evil, and consumer disposability, maybe the guy who screams about a bad chair is the only one who truly understands the decay of society.
It’s exhausting, brilliant, and often painfully close to home in the most absurd of ways. Just be sure to check the bolts on your sofa before you watch, and try to keep that inner Tim spirit animal concealed, at least until you know the furniture in your home, isn't conspiring against you.
9.5/10
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