To pick up a thread from last week’s The Chair Company recap: If there’s anything that bonds Fisher Robay CEO Jeff Levjman, Canton Marketplace at Bear Run lead Ron Trosper, and low-level hood Mike Santini, it’s loneliness. For Ron and Mike, it’s been apparent from the start: Ron sealed off in his home office or office office, conducting frantic Google searches; or Mike shining his shoes in a sad bachelor apartment where the obscenities of Wazy Wayne’s mingle with his neighbors’ blood-curdling screams. In “Happy Birthday, A Friend,” we see further evidence of this in the way new workplace stress puts more distance between Ron and his family or the heartfelt (if incredibly silly) note Mike writes in a birthday card.
But we’re getting our first true look at Jeff’s isolation this week. We sense it during the gathering in the cold open, when the camera separates him from fellow jagoff executives who include a dead ringer for dead software mogul/occasional presidential hopeful/frequent fugitive John McAfee and a guy with the heinous bowl cut of Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis. And it carries over to the rest of the episode—which, to me, is a bit of a step down from the delirious heights of “I Won. Zoom In.”—as an emboldened Jeff cuts a bewildering, lone-wolf path across the Canton Marketplace project.
He tells Ron and Brenda to scrap their current layout, without any clear instructions or coherent requests for what he’d like to see next. He, bafflingly and hilariously, presents Zillow-worthy photographs from his trip to Sedona as a blueprint for a new design. While overworked colleagues crowd together to brainstorm ideas that will satisfy their mad king, Jeff invites himself to Seth’s birthday party, hoping to bounce some ideas around with a more “relaxed” Ron. He arrives and leaves alone, disappointed that the gathering is “kinda like a kid’s party.”
It’s maybe the first time I’ve seen this sort of corporate brainrot parodied so precisely on TV—a more banal variation on the Succession or Silicon Valley thing of mistaking wealth and a place in the C-suite for intelligence and wide-ranging expertise. If you’ve ever worked for someone like this, it’s worth a knowing snicker: You’ve been in Ron’s shoes, and his frustrations are familiar. With the McAfee guy’s taunt about “boxes” burrowing under his skin, Jeff invents a bunch of problems. Naturally, he, and he alone, knows the solutions.
And that’s the operative term: alone. Like Mike in the store, staring at that chocolate King Kong and wondering who he could give it to (so sad, so funny). Like Ron at the end of “Happy Birthday, A Friend,” all by himself in a crowded room (of chairs).
That shot, widening in time with Tim Robinson’s dopey grin to reveal row after row of Teccas, is the defining image of the episode. But the one that encapsulates The Chair Company so far comes earlier, when Jeff comes out of the house while Ron is trying in vain to shoo away Mike. Slightly hunched over, awkwardly craning his neck, he’s trapped between the two lonely men helping Ron to make his life a living hell: The one he thought he could be, pre-chair, and the one he’s in danger of becoming, post-chair.
It’s a tug-of-war that’s all over “Happy Birthday, A Friend.” We see it in the hectic, Pere Ubu-backed montage of tense days and nights at Fisher Robay and in Ron’s explosion at the trespassing R/C enthusiasts that leads to his physical confrontation with Jeff. The inserts of the fight with the dented forehead guy and the barrage of photos and footage timed to the machine-gun breakdown in “Life Stinks” are a touch literal, but the point stands: Between his investment in exposing Tecca and Jeff’s unreasonable demands, Ron is coming apart at the seams.
Though this episode begins with more garden-variety strangeness like chasing the headphones guy out of life-of-the-party class and a stilted, monitored coffee break with Amanda, the workplace disruptions and the stuff going on at home gets weirder as the pressures on Ron mount. Mind you, this is different from saying we’re seeing these things because he’s getting more stressed out. Storytelling-wise, I feel like the escalation from “Dr. Stevens moved into the office” to “credible proof that a co-worker has a screwdriver in her abdominal cavity” runs in tandem with the increased tension. Those kinds of gags aren’t always as seamlessly blended into the narrative as they were in “I Won. Zoom In,” but they’re still pretty funny. I got a big laugh out of the guy putting the birthday cake on top of Seth’s puke and declaring, “It’s fine. It’s covered.”
Punctuating too many scenes like that takes some of the unpredictability out of The Chair Company, though it’s restored in the final sequence at the “’50s Cop Hop.” Amid the doo-wop, carnival rides, and omnipresent police officers, the paranoia and suspense of a big-time thriller set piece intersects with the surreality of Ron potentially getting busted by somebody wearing Halloween-store nerd and Elvis accessories on top of their uniform. I admire the episode’s reverie of a climax, with its maze of connecting rooms and woozy audio/visual presentation. The exterminator’s hunch paying off is a dream come true for Ron at the end of a nightmare made up of Jeff’s meddling, Mike’s clinginess, and threatening phone calls from some unknown entity.
But hitting the mother lode like this probably isn’t going to help Ron’s loneliness, something he’s only contributing to by trying to put space between himself and Mike. It’s worth noting he’s by himself in his moment of triumph just as he is when he finds the dubious link between the headphone guy’s tattoos and the color schemes on the Delaware City and Red Ball websites. There’s already so much he’s missing because of work and the investigation, as he’s not up to date on where Barb stands with the Everpump investors and he’s totally unaware of the project Seth started in the basement with Tara’s ponytailed friend Richard.
It’s humming along in the background of this installment, but while Ron is giving his daughter more reasons to worry about him, he’s also growing alienated from his son. He can’t keep the kid’s friends straight anymore, the clandestine drinking is getting worse, and he’s too distracted/keyed-up to give into a request to do “the Pee-wee dance” at the party. In his obsession with the chair, Ron is making Seth into a whole other lonely guy. And at the end of this episode, nothing could seem more destructive.
Stray observations
- • You can feel the aggravation and credit-card debt of a writers’ room full of former improv students in that description of the life-of-the party class. “It’s mainly people that are really bad at socializing, people that work with their computers a lot. It’s basically a scam—you move up the levels, but they’re basically the same.”
- • One for The Big Book Of Screamable Tim Robinson Quotes: “Seth! Goddammit. Now the door has a little mark on it.”
- • On top of everything else, Ron has to deal with Douglas’ latest idea for boosting office morale: “I’m going to come in dressed as a chicken tomorrow.”
