The Chair Company (series): Much better than I anticipated

If you are not clear about who Tim Robinson actually is you are not alone. He is one of those comedians out there that it doesn't really make much sense to me how it is that people keep shoving money in his direction because most of what he does isn't really worth watching.

One of his clips from his sometimes ok show I Think You Should Leave might be something you recognize because it has become a meme.

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Apparently, Robinson was on Saturday Night Live and that is how he got his foot in the door. He was on there from 2012-2016 and that is probably why I never heard of the guy because who watched SNL anymore?

I saw his face on the advert for The Chair Company and I basically just ignored it because while Tim does have his moments that are hilarious in some of the things that he does, I Think You Should Leave was mostly unfunny crap and I expected this to be the same.

I'm actually pretty delighted to say that this is a departure from his usual short sketch comedy and instead is a big-picture series - which of course is about something stupid - but somehow manages to work.

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So the story here is that Ron Trosper (Robinson), who is a project manager for a property development company that builds shopping malls and I guess that is supposed to be funny because shopping malls aren't really something that people go to anymore.

When he is giving a presentation one day at a corporate events he goes to sit down on a chair and the chair breaks, briefly rendering him unconscious and making him feeling embarrassed about the fact that he fell. After being picked on a bit and getting harassed by HR because on the ground he accidentally looked up an unattractive coworker's skirt, he decides that he is going to reach out to the company that makes the chairs and demand answers about how it is that a chair could collapse and break so easily.

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When he attempt to get in touch with the comaany "Tecca" who manufactures the chairs he ends up going through something that I think most of us can relate to. It is nigh on impossible to get any contact information from their website, you end up speaking to an AI chatbot with no real helpful information, then when you do get a phone number and call, you are put through an enormous menu to automate as much of the process as possible then when you actually talk to a human being, they are powerless to provide you with any real answers.

Most people would just let it go at this point but Ron feels as though he has been seriously wronged by the chair manufacturing company and keeps digging until he starts to unravel that Tecca the office furniture company, is some sort of covert operation that is doing bad things to society. Ron has a lot of theories about this but then one day he is attacked in the parking lot of his work by a thug that was hired by Tecca.

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He keeps digging into the company and starts to find what he believes is a massive operation built on smuggling among other things and the more he digs the more he discovers that all of the information put online about this chair company is false including who works there, where they are located, and even what they manufacture.

All the while he is still forced to carry on with his corporate life and for me, this is where a lot of the real comedy came into play.

If you have never had to work in an office like this consider yourself extremely fortunate: The drab environment that is filled with everything looking the same and how everyone just starts to seem like an lifeless wage-slave starts to get to you after just a very short while. Things only get much worst (in real life) whenever you have to interact with Human Resources and their new and ever evolving rules and safety videos that you are forced to endure.

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As Ron keeps digging he starts to reveal other aspects of this chair company and we, the viewer, can't really tell if this is a real conspiracy, or if Ron is just made to feel this way because every corporation has awful customer service. I can relate to a lot of what happens in this series because honestly, fast and good customer service doesn't really exist anymore and the only way that a company is going to help you is if you are relentless and dig really deep in order to actually find a phone number.

In one particularly funny scene, Ron is elated that he finally got the contact information for Tecca's parent company called "Red Ball" think it was, only to call the number and end up being on hold listening to repetitive music and a repeating message about how "your call is important to us" for 5 hours before he finally gives up.

There is an ever growing list of side characters that Ron enlists to help him bring down this nefarious global operation and the comedy that we encounter along the way isn't particularly intelligent, but it is more of a stupid and well to be honest, very specific to Tim Robinson that reminds me of some of his skits on I think You Should Leave.

The team of writers probably didn't know any other way to write but somehow managed to make something that are 30 minute episodes stick a lot better than the vignettes that were in the sketch comedy that he has done in the past.

Should I watch it?

I will admit that the trailer above doesn't do much to entice people to watch it but I think they were trying to not reveal all the characters before you have even seen the show because a lot of them join in very unsuspecting ways.

But the show actually is quite funny in an unusual way that I haven't really seen in any other comedy. It combines the tedium of everyday life and work with the potential of accidentally uncovering something important. Yet, the show is presented in such a way that even after all 6 existing episodes I can't decide if the conspiracy is real, or if Ron is just making the situation out to be bigger than it is.

If you ever been driven to near madness by office jobs or poor to non-existent customer service, you'll be able to relate to a lot of what happens in this and that is part of the reason why it works so well.

The episodes are only 30 minutes long also and this appeals to me because it seems like these days that there is some sort of mandate that everything has to be an hour long even if you only have 20 minutes of actual material. Things move fast in this, so after half an hour you will know if you want to carry on. I did, and now I've run out of episodes.

If you are the type of person that needs to have all episodes available before watching, season 1 will be fully released by the end of November, 2025.

_{the only LEGAL way to watch this at the moment is to stream it as part of your HBO Max subscription}