Earlier this week, HBO rolled out the premiere of The Chair Company, the latest in Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s TV explorations of anxiety, awkwardness, and the urge to get to the bottom of that fundamental question, “What did they do to us?!” Which feels, if our efforts to talk about I Think You Should Leave or Detroiters with our friends and neighbors over the last several years have been anything to go off of, like kind of a niche thing. But, no: The Chair Company was apparently HBO’s most-watched comedy premiere in years.
And, sure, that accolade is slightly tarnished by the fact that the last holder of the record was Armando Iannucci’s sci-fi comedy Avenue 5, a series that arrived with some fanfare back in 2020 but which you basically never hear anyone make a peep about in the year of our lord 2025. But the fact remains that a lot more people watched the Chair Company premiere than you might think, adding up to 1.4 million views in the episode’s first three days. (Mostly on HBO Max, with less then ten percent of viewers doing so on old-fashioned terrestrial HBO.) That’s a lot of people feeling unpleasantly relatable feelings about falling in front of your co-workers, or doubling down on things you shouldn’t, or your fear that other people will find out about the secret wheelbarrow you sometimes surreptitiously take outside. (Comparing the show’s numbers to I Think You Should Leave is close-to-impossible, thanks to Netflix’s secrecy around ratings, but a direct comparison to Detroiters, which ran on Comedy Central from 2017 to 2018, shows The Chair Company out-performing it at something like five times viewership.) (This is also your reminder to go re-watch Detroiters.)
The Hollywood Reporter notes that HBO is having a very good Sunday overall at the moment: Mark Ruffalo’s Task, which is serving as a lead-in for The Chair Company at the moment, has also had its viewership explode. The series’ premiere has grown to ten million viewers, several weeks after the fact, and its penultimate installment, which aired with the Chair Company premiere, pulled in 4 million viewers in its first three days of availability. Anxiety attacks and Ruffalo in a Delco accent: That’s apparently what Sunday night TV viewers crave.
