‘The Chair Company’ Review: Tim Robinson Turns Everyday Rage into Dark Comedy (HBO Max)

That’s the problem with the world today. People make garbage and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain to them, you can’t get an apology. I want to scream at them«. We’ve heard comments like this more than once. The classic annoyed guy, vaguely angry at “the system” (corporations, companies, neighbors, coworkers, life in general) who tends to lash out in fury at almost everything—most often at employees on the other end of the phone. Ron Trosper is one of those guys. Played by Tim Robinson, an actor known for portraying this type of character, Ron may at first glance seem kind, calm, even bland. But inside, he’s angry—furious. And he doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

In series like I Think You Should Leave, where his comedic style was expressed through sketches, Tim Robinson perfected a cringe-inducing, irritating humor that isn’t for everyone. Similar to Nathan Fielder—who, in his own way, also provokes mixed reactions—Robinson has carved out a creative niche and a world of his own. And The Chair Company may be the series that expresses this style most openly and accessibly to date. Through the misadventures of the complaining, paranoid Ron, the show perhaps captures something of the irritating spirit of contemporary life.

Ron seems like a typical normie: a mid-level manager at a development company whose new project is a shopping mall in Canton, Ohio, where he lives with his kind wife, his adult lesbian daughter who is about to get married, and his seemingly polite teenage son. In the opening scene, where he nearly argues with a waitress at a restaurant, it’s clear he’s hiding a palpable tension under the surface—but he seems able to control it. He admits he’s nervous about the speech he has to give to present the mall, an ambitious project that will make him its public face and spokesperson.

Everything seems to go well during the presentation—in fact, his speech is met with applause—until an unexpected, seemingly minor accident occurs. When he sits back down, the chair collapses, and he falls to the floor in a spectacular fashion. A few chuckles from the audience, the inevitable glimpse of a woman’s underwear while he’s sprawled, and the embarrassment might have passed as a funny anecdote—but not for Ron, who erupts with rage and hate. Against whom? Against the chair company that gives the series its title.

From there, our antihero embarks on a crusade to “do something” about the company responsible, in his eyes, for his humiliation. But the phone operators seem like AI programs, the website is vague, the email bounces back, and he has no better idea than to investigate them, to see what’s behind that seemingly insignificant Chair Company that annoys him so much. And the strangest thing is that everything suggests it might actually be something that could make anyone paranoid.

That’s the premise—the relatively original starting point—of this dark comedy mixed with suspense, following the increasingly absurd misadventures of Ron as he acts like a private detective trying to figure out what’s behind the company that threw him completely off balance. Not only will he track them down and try to guess what they’re hiding, but he’ll also feel like he’s being followed, like someone has it in for him for reasons he doesn’t understand.

Within this absurd setting, he encounters other characters, both curious and unhinged, navigates a workplace where people start looking at him increasingly strangely, and his family stability is completely disrupted, bringing guilt and frustration. While he promises himself to abandon his investigation and focus on his family and normal life, something always happens to drag him back into trouble. Until he resolves his “problem,” it’s clear he won’t find peace.

The Chair Company becomes a more episodic series than it might have been, connected more to Robinson’s specialty—brief, intense sketches—than to the classic narrative structure of a conventional series. Each episode is packed with strange encounters, clashes with peculiar characters, and discoveries that are both mysterious and absurd. Many of them seem designed to provoke laughter on their own, regardless of how they fit into the larger story.

Beyond this sometimes overwhelming tone (it’s a show where if someone isn’t yelling or angry, they’re cursing repeatedly), The Chair Company accurately portrays a personality and spirit that may once have been marginal but is now central to contemporary culture: the angry man against the system, the kind of guy who conducts “online investigations” and ends up with wild conspiracy theories, often targeting himself. The curious—or ironic—thing here is that his paranoia seems to have some basis in reality. But at the core, anyone convinced the world is against them will always feel that way. There’s no way—and no evidence—that could convince him otherwise.