14 hours ago
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Meet Ron Trosper, a faithful office grunt in small town Ohio. Ron works for a company that builds shopping malls, and their latest one is the first for which Ron has been made project lead, despite some of his superiors’ misgivings. Today is his big day. He’s giving a speech at the launch!
Ron is the creation of Tim Robinson, the former Saturday Night Live writer/performer who reinvented the American sketch show in 2019 with I Think You Should Leave. In a new half-hour, eight-episode series that starts as a workplace comedy before sprawling into mystery/thriller territory, his alter ego is a stock Robinson character, a variation on the textbook comic protagonist who has to bear the burden of being the only sane man in every room. Ron is genuinely beset by absurdity, misfortune and other people’s idiocy and selfishness, but always manages to react in a way that makes everyone around him conclude that he is the problem. Whereas Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm met the world’s small annoyances in a rational but insensitive manner, Ron combats them irrationally and too sensitively.
The opening scene sets the tone: Ron is quite rightly vexed by a waitress crassly hovering over the family’s table while his wife, Barb (Lake Bell), is trying to raise a toast to him. But by the time Ron has finished speaking to the young woman, he has got into a ridiculous argument caused by his refusal to accept that she never shops in malls, and has too aggressively insisted on boxing up half a devilled egg to take home. Later on, in the silent middle of the night, a restless Ron raises his head, irritated by something else now: “I swear I have the worst pillow in town!”
Robinson’s followers will be able to hear him say that line in their heads, or the one where he overemotes at how nice the restaurant food looks: “This is ssssstunning!!” Countless amateur comedians on YouTube and TikTok have borrowed that manic, suddenly shouting intonation, but without nailing character details as carefully as Robinson does. Everything his fans would expect in a leading man is present as Ron, hunched and forever hyperventilating, prowls from one embarrassment to another in his crap suit, squinting through unflattering glasses, fingermarked and askew.
Of course, Ron’s big presentation goes haywire, via a moment of roaringly well-executed slapstick that causes our friend to embark on a truly wild crusade against a negligent office-chair manufacturer. The overarching story, in which Ron’s obsessive persistence leads him to become entangled in a strange conspiracy – there are hints of Only Murders in the Building in the way the narrative is unafraid to unfurl haphazardly, while director Andrew DeYoung sometimes films Robinson as if he is in a paranoid 1970s movie thriller – might be more ambitious than the traditional office comedy, but both are ideal vehicles for Robinson’s comic gifts.
Aside from embodying pure cringeworthy rage in his performance, as a writer Robinson is – along with regular collaborator Zach Kanin – brilliant at making supporting or one-off characters and situations just that little bit more extreme than an average comedy would think appropriate. If the script has the need for a shop assistant who acts oddly, or a cafe owner too busy to answer Ron’s questions, or an unhelpful customer service operator who knows nothing about the business they represent, Robinson and Kanin make sure the interaction has the unforgettable unpredictability and intensity of an I Think You Should Leave skit. All comedy is essentially about surprises and in The Chair Company, you can’t tell exactly when the next massive, stupid laugh is coming. Ron’s colleagues are just the right amount of wacky, too, from the janitor jealously guarding his wheelbarrow to Ron’s nemesis, a kindly older co-worker who has stopped taking his career seriously and starting blowing bubbles across the room during important meetings.
The test of whether The Chair Company turns out to be great or just very good will be Robinson’s ability to sustain himself across a longer, more narrative-driven format. Episodes of his hilarious but exhausting sketch show ran to just 15 minutes. There are positive early signs: beneath all the goofing are tender hints that Ron is acting out because his two kids are growing up and he is worried that he is now too old to achieve anything, but we can see that his wife and kids don’t agree that he’s a loser and that they are his big achievement. So can Ron take Robinson to the next level? To borrow a phrase from one of his unanswered emails to the chair people: “I look very forward” to finding out.
