Chair man, of the bored
You fall off a chair and your life falls apart.
This is, more or less, the premise of The Chair Company, streaming in India on JioHotstar, but that sounds simple, and nothing about this deranged, precision-engineered panic attack of a series is simple.
Tim Robinson, the chaos merchant behind the riotously funny I Think You Should Leave (Netflix), stretches his talent across a long-form narrative instead of 6-minute sketches, and instead of the show collapsing under the weight of his neuroses, the neuroses turn into scaffolding. He builds a skyscraper of anxiety. Then he throws you off it.
It begins with a workplace accident. That’s what HR would call it; The Chair Company treats it like an origin myth. Ron Trosper, played by Robinson as if he’s permanently halfway through an apology, takes a stupid tumble on an office stage. It’s a big day for him, but he falls. It’s mundane, of course, but mortifying.
Who can he blame but the chair? In that leap—from “I slipped” to “who designed this trap?”—lies the entire series. Ron, unable to accept that he’s merely clumsy, does what any responsible adult in late capitalism does when faced with discomfort: he looks for a customer service number.
He wants to complain. He wants a refund, an apology, a voucher code, some acknowledgement that this was not random. He wants, above all, for it not to be his fault. And as he waits on hold, and waits, and waits—Robinson turning that dead space into a slow-motion meltdown—the world begins to rearrange itself. Patterns emerge. Connections appear. Like a true conspiracy theorist, Ron starts with one thread and soon sees threads everywhere, until the entire world looks like one of those pinboards from detective shows. The series weaponises something comically tiny and inflates it to Kafkaesque madness. It’s impossible to look away.
Ron Trosper is never likeable. Robinson knows likability is for toothpaste and politicians, not protagonists. Ron is awkward all the time. He ricochets off conversations, he misreads every room, he acts with a level of callous tunnel-vision. He fights with his family, he shoves his boss, he sabotages his own life to stay on hold.
Yet as a viewer, we are on his side. Ron goes all-in. When he calls the chair company, he stays on hold for over 5 hours, marinating in that soft-rock purgatory most of us barely endure for 20 minutes. When he senses something wrong, he never stops digging. He doesn’t half-arse his paranoia; he full-arses it. There’s something nobly pathetic about that.
In a world where most of us accept broken things—broken products, broken systems, broken conversations—and mutter our complaints into group chats instead of to actual people, Ron is the idiot who insists on escalation. “People make garbage and you can’t talk to anybody,” he blurts, encapsulating the modern condition as neatly as any thinkpiece. He is not nice. He is not right. But he’s not wrong.
Robinson has always played men who are overreacting to something trivial, but in The Chair Company, the triviality itself becomes the point. The longer Ron insists this matters, the more it starts to matter. What’s remarkable is how Robinson translates his sketch-comedy sensibility into a sustained, coherent paranoia. The Chair Company moves like a series of deranged bits stitched together with red thread, yet somehow, miraculously, it all holds. Every character, every clue, every dynamic is quirky enough to be the centrepiece of its own sketch.
There’s the person with a “burger room,” a guy who wants to abandon basketball for stop-motion animation, a thug who is deeply creepy and yet somehow a close friend, a man who can alternately menace and confide, a walking reminder that intimacy and danger now share the same password. The porn parody of a fable holds the same lessons as the fable itself.
The setpieces escalate with a bravado that would make Paul Thomas Anderson nod in approval. Scenes spin out unpredictably, then click into place at breakneck speed. Robinson’s performance in the movie Friendship (JioHotstar), that bizarro take reminiscent of the already bizarre The Cable Guy, feels now like a dry run for this kind of narrative: where friendship itself is a glitch, where intimacy is weaponised and tone can turn on a dime.
People in power do weird things. This may not necessarily be inhuman, moustache-twirling villainy, but careless, baffling, shareholder-pleasing weirdness. They make inscrutable systems and flimsy chairs and labyrinthine helplines. They hide behind disclaimers. They ruin your day with a dropped call and then survey you about your experience.
The series is outlandish, but its point is piercingly clear: even an idiot can blow a whistle. You don’t have to be noble, or valiant, or particularly competent to notice that something is off. You just have to mind enough to keep questioning. The world makes garbage and you can’t talk to anybody. Thanks to Tim Robinson, you can laugh while you’re on hold.
Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.