'The Chair Company' review: Chaos merchant Tim Robinson mines his anxieties

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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.