There are lines from I Think You Should Leave that are always rattling around in my brain: “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” “I don’t even want to be around anymore,” “Triples is best,” etc. But the one I come back to most often encapsulates the impotent rage and inability to let anything go that unites Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s breakout Netflix hit, its Comedy Central predecessor Detroiters, and their new HBO series The Chair Company: “What have they done to us?” Whether it’s the property-line-defending spokesman for the Darmine Doggy Door, the Driving Crooner, or Chair Company schmoe Ron Trosper, Robinson and Kanin’s protagonists typically have some amorphous, nefarious “they” aligned against them. But to this point, only Trosper’s story has had the space to really put a face to the they—or explore if there’s even a they there.
Similar to the Robinson-starring Friendship (which hails from one of The Chair Company’s primary directors, Andrew DeYoung), the series premiere “Life Goes By Too F**king Fast, It Really Does” is an experiment in how long I Think You Should Leave-style premises and schtick can be sustained. In terms of keeping my shoulders tense and my hand firmly cupped around my mouth, the episode does the trick. This is quintessential Robinson/Kanin stuff: the small sting of public humiliation festering to the point that it consumes a character’s entire being. In Ron’s case, the swing dancer who flips his wife over at a wedding is the chair that collapses beneath him following a big corporate presentation. His moment of triumph—being named the project manager for a new mall in Canton, Ohio—thus sullied, our man from Fisher Robay tumbles down a rabbit hole that exposes character flaws that make for the cringiest of cringe comedy. Yet there’s just enough hard evidence to suggest that this isn’t all in his head.
“Life Goes By Too F**king Fast, It Really Does,” however, is. It’s deeply embedded in Ron’s POV: As his search for answers ramps up, the episode trades a more workmanlike depiction of home and office life for the look and feel of a conspiracy thriller whose stakes are much higher than “Who tampered with the furniture to make this one guy look like an ass in front of his peers?” DeYoung and cinematographer Ashley Connor shoot Ron’s introduction to the Canton Marketplace at Bear Run, an otherwise bog-standard corporate address, in a bobbing, long-lens surveillance style. There’s some comedy to be found in that disconnect, as in the tension between the more paranoid electronic burbles of Keegan Dewitt’s score and easygoing ’70s needle drops from Jim Croce and George Benson. But this is mostly mood setting, settling us into Ron’s short-fused state of mind even as the script takes his descent into madness from 0 to 60—a pacing that makes a lot of sense, considering the creators’ sketch-comedy background.
That background provides us a shortcut to understanding Ron, too. He is the Tim Robinson archetype: a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road dude without many healthy emotional outlets or, from what we can glean from the first 32 minutes of The Chair Company, genuine connections with other people. These qualities didn’t prevent him from marrying the conventionally attractive Barb (Lake Bell) or from raising a basketball phenom son (Will Price’s Seth) and a daughter who’s about to get married (Sophia Lillis’ Natalie), but they do clearly keep him from being satisfied with how relatively good he has it.
That’s driven home by an early exchange with the co-worker who was passed over for Ron’s promotion, Douglas (Jim Downey). The few pearls about contentment from the bubble-necklace-wearing old-timer played by 2025’s hottest septuagenarian comedy writer go in one of Ron’s ears and out the other. Yet they burrow deep enough beneath his skin that he later rips Douglas’ prized toy bauble from his neck after he disrupts one of Ron’s cockamamie attempts at exposing mysterious chair manufacturer Tecca. Ron might be asserting his status with this little faux pas, but the fact that it becomes another source of anxiety proves such power plays don’t come naturally to him. Robinson makes his character seem much more accustomed to peeking through horizontal blinds, cowering under his desk, or sneaking out of his office on his knees.
That we’ve learned so little about anyone else in his orbit is where The Chair Company starts to look less like an extended sketch and more like a weekly TV series. Little details about Seth’s college prospects or Natalie’s upcoming nuptials are teased out but left for future installments to expand upon. We don’t know everything about Ron yet, either; a late-episode sitdown with his boss, Brenda (Zuleyma Guevara), reveals that he previously left Fisher Robay for a year to start a pipe dream of an outdoor excursion company that led to one, sad rope bridge paid for by a mortgage on the Trosper family home. (It’s apparently become his preferred sulking spot, as we see after the chair incident.) And then there’s the matter of the guy who later attacks Ron in the parking lot, apparent retribution for his trespassing on Tecca property—a fruitless adventure that leads to nothing but the discovery of some photocopied porn, a big red ball, and a filthy toilet stall that Ron made filthier thanks to his insistence that one half of a deviled egg appetizer would make for good leftovers down the road.
Those smutty smartphone snapshots are bound to come back and haunt Ron, as is the indignity-within-the-indignity of unintentionally seeing up a colleague’s skirt after the chair gave way. These are reasons to want to see what else Robinson and Kanin have in store for us in the coming weeks, as are the little bits of comic embroidery they do around the rising action and character building. I Think You Should Leave-esque flourishes abound, like the telling cutaway to Ron complaining he has “the worst pillow in town,” one co-worker telling another “you gave me that paper too hard,” or the office custodian fretting over being caught outdoors with his “inside wheelbarrow.”
There’s no mistaking who created this show, and I have to imagine that your mileage with it will vary with your tolerance for Robinson’s onscreen persona and his and Kanin’s knack for digging that persona into deep, deep, deep holes. Performance-wise, there’s not a ton he’s showing us in the premiere that he hasn’t shown us elsewhere; it’s the packaging and the storytelling real estate that’s different. That, plus there’s the opportunity to play around with mysteries that go a little bit further (but still contain trace ingredients of) those questions that plague the guy who thought he was going to be eaten by a pig in a Richard Nixon mask. What have they done to us? What are they doing to Ron? I don’t know, but this premiere makes me eager to find out.
Stray observations
- • Hello and welcome to The A.V. Club’s weekly coverage of The Chair Company. I’m former A.V. Club managing editor (and a whole bunch of other job titles before that) Erik Adams, and I’m honored to be back in these pages after three years of, oh, let’s say, trying to start a Jeep adventure company out of my garage. I’ll essentially be watching the show alongside y’all. HBO sent out the first six episodes ahead of the premiere, but I’m watching them one at a time to preserve the week-by-week experience. Now to take my seat in what I’m sure is a perfectly stable chair….
- • Has there been any interview with Robinson or Kanin where they address the origin of the “Trosper” name? It’s clearly one that’s been with them for a while, based on the unexplained “TROSPER CO.” banner that runs atop the game board in I Think You Should Leave’s “Chunky” sketch. I guess what I mean to say is: We just gotta figure out, like, what Trosper’s deal is. We had aaaaaaallllllll six years since the show premiered to think of it!
