Netflix's The Chair is breezy, funny and often very smart -- it'll leave you wanting more

RogerEbert.com

The Sandra Oh-led Netflix limited series, created by Amanda Peet and Annie Wyman, is one of the breeziest and easiest shows to watch, says Brian Tallerico. "So many Netflix shows feel stretched to meet a running time that they can’t possibly fill or are merely designed to be distractions to fit the algorithm," he says. “The Chair is more substantial than that, and it really feels like a warm-up for a show that could eventually take a seat at the table when it comes to the best on television." Tallerico adds: "There’s so much smart material here that the only disappointing aspect is how often The Chair feels like it’s just on the verge of really unpacking the changing dynamics between faculty and students in the ‘20s before pulling its punches ever so slightly. Part of the problem is that Wyman and Peet try to do so much in six episodes of half-hour television."

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• The Chair is hardly worthy of Sandra Oh's involvement: The Netflix series is "a bait and switch of a series that only gives vague lip service to the idea of exploring the festering sexism and racism in the world of higher education," says Lacy Baugher Milas. "Worst of all, it largely ignores its complicated female lead in favor of telling the story of yet another white man who seems destined to fail upward despite himself. Perhaps the fact that this series is the first offering from former Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss under their new Netflix deal should have been enough of a warning that this sort of in-name-only feminist storytelling was not only possible but likely, but it’s still incredibly disappointing, nevertheless."
• The Chair understands how to poke sticks in the eyes of people and issues worthy of being poked, but it never loses its sense of humanity: "The tone of The Chair reminds me a lot of Togetherness, which makes sense since Peet starred in that HBO series and Duplass co-created it," says Jen Chaney. "Like that slice-of-life combo of drama and comedy, this Netflix series has a strong sardonic streak but also a beating heart. It understands that every person — whether you’re the daughter of a busy single mother, a frustrated student, or a scholar worried you’ve aged out of relevancy — ultimately is just trying to feel seen and wanted. It shows us how all those people function in a world that looks pretty close to real life: funny, and melancholy, and a constant shambles, where the best you can hope for is a spot to settle comfortably, one that won’t completely collapse under your own weight."
• Oh holds together the "mess" that is The Chair: "The Chair is entertaining in a knockabout way, if you don’t look too closely, and Oh is wonderful every minute she’s in it," says Robert Lloyd. "But I found it frustratingly vague: We never learn exactly how Ji-Yoon has come to the job, by campaign or collegial acclaim, or what it was like when Bill was running it, or how he so quickly stops mourning his wife and mooning over Ji-Yoon. And it is often at odds with itself. Its attempt to mix romantic comedy of a sort with an issue-oriented workplace satire — analogous to any institution, including the ones that make TV shows and newspapers, where questions of diversity and representation, empty promises and actual change, are being raised — is ambitious, but not well-integrated."
• The Chair is a role aptly suited for Oh, who gets to let loose showing off her comedy chops: "Like most college students, The Chair is incredibly ambitious at what it will achieve in its short time and occasionally falls flat, but overall the series beats the metaphorical curve," says Kelly Lawler, adding: "In addition to Oh's charms, Chair is a darkly funny satire, skewering aspects of modern higher education with veritable glee. The characters are sharply written and feel real and grounded, even as the events surrounding them become more crazed. Duplass, who might have been the protagonist of a lesser series, revels in playing a part as self-destructive as Bill, a man who can barely get out of bed in the morning, let alone defend his values as an educator."
• Like her duties as chair, it’s up to Sandra Oh to hold all these subplots together, and she does so with aplomb: "There is never a wrong emotional beat or comical tick from the veteran actress," says Marya E. Gates. "In the early episodes, it feels like we don’t get to know why Ji-Yoon told her daughter she wanted to read novels and poems as long as she could because we rarely see her doing just that. However, by the season’s end, it’s clear that is exactly the point. Women of color often don’t get to just be. They’re expected to lead the charge for progress or to clean up everyone else’s messes. In the few glimpses, we do get of Ji-Yoon teaching, we see the joy beaming from Oh’s expressive face, and a light exudes from her entire body. This is her element and Oh perfectly, silently expresses the beguiling pleasure many of us only find between the pages of a good book. Tightly written and expertly cast, The Chair deftly weaves absurdist comedy gold from what happens when a calling and a profession morphs into an industry where neither progress nor passion can blossom."
• The Chair is a story of how those trying the hardest to create change — who need progress the most — still get stuck with the proverbial bomb in their laps: "Weighty themes aside, Peet and Wyman’s series is far from a heavy watch," says Ben Travers. "Tight episodes are buoyed by an ebullient passion for the collegiate experience, and seeing Sandra Oh play hot potato for six half-hour episodes is exactly as much fun as it sounds. Whether she’s sparring with the very visible old guard — highlighted by Holland Taylor’s sprightly put-upon Professor Hambling, Bob Balaban’s Professor Rentz, and the Dean himself, David Morse — or working on behalf of the fresh talent (mainly Professor McKay played by Nana Mensah), Oh brings a specificity to each interaction that conveys a long history with each individual. Never is that more apparent than with Duplass’ Professor Bill Dobson; saying the two share an electric chemistry is both true and a disservice to the layered relationship revealed largely by performance."
• The best reason to sit through the anemic first four episodes is for the series’ deepening portrayal of a Korean American woman in situations seldom explored in pop culture: "It’s rare enough to have an Asian American protagonist with an Asian name like Ji-Yoon — a small but purposeful assertion of non-accommodation," says Inkoo Kang. "It’s rarer still to encounter Ji-Yoon’s parenting situation: that of an Asian American adoptive mother imparting Korean culture to a resentful daughter who’s more interested in getting in touch with her Mexican roots. Then there’s the uneasy situation that Ji-Yoon, like so many Asian Americans in elite workplaces, finds herself in — more accepted by White gatekeepers than their Black or Brown counterparts, their proximity to power and leadership then interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as political complacency. Creators Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, an Asian American scholar and screenwriter, maintain a delicate touch with the smaller cultural details — like the cross that hangs in Ji-Yoon’s home, they’re unobtrusive if you’re not looking for them, and hearteningly familiar if you are."
• The Chair is an enjoyable campus tour: "The Chair is a nice, tidy six-episode binge, and at about three hours total, it feels like a slightly extended indie-film comedy, set to a soundtrack of jangly college radio hits from the likes of Vampire Weekend and the Smiths," says Dave Nemetz. "We know Peet as an actress, but this is her debut as a TV writer and showrunner, and she shows a real knack for humanist comedy. (Peet’s husband David Benioff and his Game of Thrones partner D.B. Weiss serve as executive producers, too, but don’t worry: This one sticks the landing.) The scripts have a distinctly dry sense of humor, and the cast finds a nice rhythm right away. It’s like they’re thankful to be in something that’s actually grounded and funny and true to life for once. It wraps up nicely as a self-contained story, too, so I’d be fine with it being a one-and-done series, I suppose — but this campus tour was so enjoyable, I’d happily sign up for more."
• The Chair deserves credit for a nuanced portrayal of "cancel culture": "Throughout its six episodes, dropping August 20 on Netflix, The Chair moves at a sharp comedic clip (tip of the hat here to Daniel Gray Longino) even as it hinges on a topic that’s become a favorite for Fox News and concerned centrists alike: the omnipresent specter of 'political correctness' supposedly running amok on college campuses, and the generational clash it tends to represent," says Caroline Framke. "In less deft hands, the inciting event of Bill playacting a Sieg Heil during a lecture could be a clunky, didactic nightmare that would inevitably make a caricature out of everyone involved. Credit where it’s due to The Chair, then, for almost entirely sidestepping that outcome with more nuanced characters and insight than most media tackling so-called 'cancel culture' comes close to achieving. Where other TV shows would lay the blame solely at the feet of hysterical students or evil teachers, The Chair manages to demonstrate the layers at play for both factions without feeling like it’s equivocating too much to have any real bite."
• It's disappointing that The Chair falls into some of the same traps as the culture it’s trying to critique: "The series turns out to be as much Bill’s story as it is Ji-Yoon’s, which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing," says Angie Han. "Peet and Wyman turn in some of their sharpest characterization with their portrait of a basically decent guy who’s been too blinkered by privilege for his own good ('Who gives a f*ck how you’re seen?' he complains at one point, with the misguided indignation of a man who’s never once had to worry what others might think of him), and Duplass so expertly toes the line between charming and aggravating that even by the end, it’s tough to know exactly how to feel about him. But far less time and energy is spent fleshing out other characters with an equal stake in the central storyline. Even as The Chair takes the students’ complaints in good faith, the students themselves are presented as an undifferentiated mass, and their arguments given to faculty characters to explain. 
• The Chair has more in mind than a lazy screed against so-called cancel culture: "Pushing the undergrad activists into the background, where they remain as constant and fickle a force as weather, allows the show to focus instead on the machinations of the characters operating in genuinely bad faith: the dean and his bosses, who are so much more concerned with avoiding scandal than about upholding the values of truth and justice that higher ed should embody," says Judy Berman, adding: "Stories set in the Ivory Tower are often understood to be insular and low-stakes, with little to offer anyone who doesn’t possess a postgraduate degree. Yet to the show’s great benefit, that prejudice doesn’t prevent Peet and Wyman from broadening its horizons....Without denying the quirks of the academy, The Chair finds in its administrative headaches a surprisingly apt metaphor for systemic ills. What could be more relatable than a cast of characters trying to do good work within an ever more complicated, unjust and indifferent system that forces them to compete with each other for scarce resources?"
• The focus Jay Duplass’ Professor Bill Dobson provides a less compelling distraction to a potentially great series: "After inexplicably performing a Nazi salute in one of his lectures, the once-popular academic finds himself at the center of a social media storm that sparks campus protests and petitions demanding he be sacked from the department," says David Craig. "There’s something to be said for The Chair’s argument that, at least in some cases, the path towards redemption shouldn’t be inaccessible, nor should knee-jerk reactions be considered a substitute for meaningful long-term change. But that Dobson himself is such an insufferable oaf undermines these valid points and makes these scenes harder to sit through, while the character’s romance with Ji-Yoon is never particularly well-established."
• It’s a great achievement that none of this feels worthy or didactic: "It feels like a genuine exploration, a dramatized discussion of intergenerational differences and divides that few are seeking to take the heat out of and examine with real interest," says Lucy Mangan. "And it’s funny. I realize I have not said much to persuade you of that. But it is light and fleet and the humor lies in the conversations between friends, in moments such as the loving flirtation between Joan and Bill at a terrible mandatory drinks party, not in gags I can lift out and present to you."
• An Asian American woman in academia tells what The Chair got right: "When I became the first Asian American woman to chair the sociology department at my university, I felt dread instead of pride," says Nancy Wang Yuen. "I faced looming budget cuts, personnel troubles and more emails than anyone can answer in a lifetime. So when Netflix announced that it was making The Chair, starring Sandra Oh as the first female chair of an English department at a fictional New England college, I literally jumped out of my chair. I couldn’t believe someone was making a workplace comedy about the lives of professors starring an Asian American woman. At the same time, I wondered whether the series, which premieres Friday, could authentically represent the professoriate, particularly the plight of women of color." She adds: "While The Chair addresses issues of racial and gender bias, it also depicts academia as a farce. Though I seldom found hilarity in the day-to-day stresses of being a department chair, I laughed heartily at the absurdity of expecting a single person to solve an entire department’s impossible problems. As an actor, Oh recognized each obstacle faced by Ji-Yoon as a point of situational comedy. She said that the comedy works precisely because 'the character doesn’t think it’s funny.' Looking back at my time as the first Asian American female chair, I can say that while I grew a lot, I never took the time to reflect and see the humor in the university setting. Seeing the most stressful elements of your profession come to life as a comedy series turns out to be surprisingly cathartic."
• Another "chair" says The Chair gets academia uncomfortably, hilariously right: "About a year before The Chair’s debut was announced, I became the first woman of color to be promoted to the rank of full professor in the English department in my university’s entire 140-year history," says Karen Tongson. "Shortly after that promotion (which I wasn’t aware would be quite so historic while I was immersed in 'trusting the process,' as Bachelor Nation might say), I was also asked to chair the department of gender and sexuality studies. Given that my own relationship to The Chair’s premise is so profoundly overdetermined, I approached the series by managing my own expectations about what it might mean to be finally seen on any screen, big or small, and on so many levels: as an Asian American woman, as a recently minted department chair, and as a Sandra Oh fan from as far back as Under the Tuscan Sun. The thirst for shows that accurately represent academia, or that bother to represent academia at all, is understandable given how spectacularly television and film have failed to get even the major details of our profession right, let alone the more nuanced aspects of its racial and gender politics as they unfold through interpersonal intrigue. Shows about academia, and humanities professors in particular, tend to fail miserably because most of our drama unfurls as minutiae, as invisible labor that exacts its toll psychologically, in isolation, and behind the scenes. Furthermore, the material rewards of academia are minuscule when compared with other purportedly 'elite' professions. The great Wendy Rhoades on Billions nailed it when she observed wryly that in 'academia everything’s a big f*cking deal because the stakes are so small.' Even the largest grants and most prestigious prizes earned by professors usually don’t amount to much in the grander scheme of America’s capitalist sensorium, so cultural capital (and its very niche stakes) remains king...The absurdism beneath academia’s shabby-genteel displays of self-importance and intellectual grandiosity amid small, yet nevertheless life-altering, stakes is what The Chair’s co-creators, Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, who received her Ph.D. in English from Harvard, truly get right.* The series sheds the earnestness and drama of so many previous small screen efforts at depicting the professoriate and strikes a screwball comedic tone befitting the actual zaniness of its subject."
• Amanda Peet jokes that her husband, Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff (an executive producer on The Chair), didn't prepare her for running a show for the first time: “I lost a lot of weight from pure anxiety and diarrhea,” says Peet with a laugh. Peet’s objective in co-creating The Chair was always to write a romantic comedy in the vein of Tootsie or Broadcast News. “I didn’t set out to take a stand on anything,” she says. “I meant to truly make an intimacy piece and a workplace romantic comedy like the ones that I love.”
• Why Sandra Oh was drawn to The Chair: “Amanda was really open to having a fully integrated character, meaning that you’re not only writing a character from the point of view of just how they’re dealing with their coworkers,” says Oh. “She’s a full person, she’s a full woman, she’s a full single mom, she’s a full daughter of an elderly parent.”