The Chair Company Is a Rich Text for Tim Robinson Sickos

Tim Robinson, who so often plays men consumed by petty fixations or compelled to take things too far, has his own fixations. On I Think You Should Leave, his breakout sketch show with creative partner Zach Kanin, it’s hard not to notice how certain motifs recur across its comedy of unease like intrusive thoughts: peculiar elderly individuals, bursts of yelling, the refusal to take blame, idiosyncratic clothing, denials of reality, and drab corporate workplaces — all of which, the last in particular, were prototyped in the sitcom Detroiters, the pair’s first TV collaboration (alongside co-creators Sam Richardson and Joe Kelly). In this year’s Friendship, a light riff on male loneliness that follows a man’s spiral into obsession with a cool-guy neighbor played by Paul Rudd, we glimpse the emergence of another Robinson motif: Where his Detroiters character was ambiently married, in the A24 film he plays a devoted family man pretending at normalcy as it slips away. That characterization returns in The Chair Company, Robinson and Kanin’s new HBO series premiering October 12, which once again finds Robinson in an anonymous-looking office, playing yet another man losing his grip. Some artists spend their lives working through the same questions that consume them; Spielberg, for instance, has been processing the dissolution of his family for decades. The Chair Company reveals Robinson as one such artist, picking ever more persistently at the knots he seems to keep untangling in his head.

Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a newly promoted corporate drone at shopping-mall-development firm Fisher Robay. (Motto: Integrating Mother Nature With Centers of Commerce.) His misadventure begins, as so many of Robinson’s sketches do, with a humiliation. After delivering his version of a rousing speech at a companywide presentation for a new project in Canton, Ohio, Ron suffers a modest embarrassment in front of his colleagues and his boss, Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips). It’s the kind of incident a cooler, more well-adjusted person might laugh off and move on from. But Ron is obviously neither. He refuses to let it go, and in the grand tradition of all great Robinson characters, his fixation curdles into mania. Convinced the incident is part of a larger conspiracy, he digs deeper in search of confirmation … and bizarrely, the universe rewards his paranoia, sending him down a rabbit hole of sketchy scenarios and phantom leads all while he struggles to hold the rest of his life together.

This description makes The Chair Company sound more conventional than it is. In practice, the show feels like an effort to carry the DNA of individual I Think You Should Leave sketches across a collection of scenes comprising Robinson and Kanin’s first serialized narrative. The connective tissue can be loose — sometimes thrillingly, sometimes bafflingly so. One thread follows Ron’s elderly co-worker Douglas (Saturday Night Live legend Jim Downey, making his second onscreen appearance this fall after One Battle After Another), who lost out on a promotion to Ron and is now making a show of rediscovering a spark for life. It’s not clear how he’ll figure into the bigger picture, but you accept that it may not matter. Another thread has Ron chasing a clue in the form of a bizarrely patterned shirt (a possible Dan Flashes callback?) that leads to a surreal encounter with a clothing-store employee who speaks in a halting, alien cadence and tries to recruit him into a mysterious membership program. At one point, Ron walks into a diner in the throes of chaos. It’s loud and the kitchen is overrun. One table is pelting fries at other customers. A man’s plate shatters on the floor. The scene plays like a fever dream. No explanations, no resolutions, and when Ron gets what he came for, the world spins on as if nothing happened.

Miraculously, even improbably, it all holds together. The Chair Company coheres into a gestalt, a whole that’s somehow greater than the sum of its absurdities. It’s a more confident expansion of Robinson’s sensibility than Friendship, which often felt like a single joke stretched too thin. The improvement comes down to shape: The Chair Company adopts the loose framework of a conspiracy thriller, giving the show a container in which to corral its spiraling logic and surreal diversions. The series has a hazy, dreamlike quality in which narrative logic bends but emotional coherence holds. The effect is almost Lynchian. Each scene obeys its own strange rhythm, yet together they form a single, deeply felt reality.

Also like Lynch, Robinson’s onscreen world hums with quiet dread, a sense that something sinister lurks just beneath the veil of the everyday banal. His humor has always been rooted in humiliation and helplessness, in the fragile border between male entitlement and panic. “That’s the problem with the world today,” Ron says at one point. “People make garbage and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain. You can’t scream at them.” But what The Chair Company really achieves is unlocking a latent horror that’s been hanging out within that humor since, at the very least, the Darmine Doggy Door sketch. You could feel it, too, in Friendship, during one of the film’s rare moments of genuine unease when the wife of Robinson’s character, played by Kate Mara, disappears in the tunnels beneath the city. In The Chair Company, that undercurrent intensifies. One episode ends with a chilling cliffhanger that pierces the illusion of safety in your own home (the payoff is equally unsettling); another finds Ron breaking into someone’s house only to stumble on a tableau straight out of Seven.

That unreality naturally raises questions about what Robinson and Kanin are really after with The Chair Company. Why, again, is Robinson cast as the improbably beloved family man? This time, his wife is played by Lake Bell, and she and their two children (played by Will Price and Sophia Lillis) adore him, almost comically, despite his weirdness and social transgressions. These scenes of familial harmony feel off, like they belong to another reality entirely. They don’t square with how Ron behaves or even how Robinson looks in the role. It’s as if we’re watching a fever dream of a man hallucinating what normal adulthood is supposed to be. Which leads to a stranger question: When other people in the show look at Ron, do they see Tim Robinson? Are we seeing Ron as he sees himself — the gremlin-man weirdo whom the rest of us have come to associate with Robinson’s persona? How are any of these readings complicated when you learn that Robinson himself is a family man with two kids?

That’s the thing about The Chair Company: It turns you into a guy who’s just asking questions. Much as it leads Ron down endless rabbit holes, the show is evocative and weird and captivating enough to pull you into chasing your own theories about the work and the comedian himself. Whether that mystery will translate beyond the Tim Robinson sickos, though, is another question. The Chair Company’s rhythms are tuned to a very specific frequency of discomfort that not everyone will find funny or even watchable. But for card-carrying sloppy-steak aficionados, it’s a rich text. The series features Robinson and Kanin pushing their sensibility to the edge, testing whether the anxious, combustible energy of I Think You Should Leave can hold steady in a longer, more fragile form. It mostly does and when it doesn’t, the fissures feel purposeful, like they’re part of the experiment. Not all the gags land, but the gags often don’t seem like the point. In the end, it seems almost like Robinson isn’t mocking obsessive male anxiety so much as sincerely expressing how it feels to be trapped inside it. Every surreal interaction, every drab office, every incongruously adoring wife is another turn through the same loop. And you get the sense he’ll be turning it over, again and again, for the rest of his life.

Correction: This review originally misattributed Friendship to Kanin. It has been updated.