Chairs!

Monday is about movies, sometimes TV. Today, I watched “The Chair Company” and I’m sure glad I did!

Last week I caught up with the HBO original series, The Chair Company. It was released late last year, and I was excited about it because I’ve loved Tim Robinson ever since his short stint on SNL, and especially for the first couple of seasons of his sketch show, I Think You Should Leave.

His co-writer for The Chair Company, SNL and I Think You Should Leave is Zach Kanin — between them, they create scenarios where Robinson gets to amplify his personality and play to the outsized persona of an outravert prone to explosion over the accumulation of the little things. Where Larry David played up his seething outrage at the world, for Curb Your Enthusiasm, always through the lens of multi-millionaire privilege and an arrogant nonchalance, Robinson is the working-schlub version. See also his recent film vehicle, Friendship. (The Chair Company character is, on paper at least, quite similar to his role as Craig Waterman in Friendship, a role he did not write, but one that was written specifically for him).

The Chair Company starts out as office sitcom, though darker and weirder than the usual, and then moves — rapidly — toward a mystery-thriller. It reminds me, tonally of black comedies like Death To Smoochy. I love that film! Everyone I’ve ever talked to about that movie hates it. They’re all wrong. They’re so wrong, I could almost explode, Tim Robinson-like, correcting their opinion and enunciating/every/word/slowly/and/loudly/so/that/the/same/damn/mistake/is not/made/ever/again.

In the first episode, Robinson’s character, Ron Trosper, is about to give a speech in front of the whole work crew — he’s recently been promoted to head a big project — and the chair collapses on stage, leaving everyone laughing at him.

Hellbent on finding out why the chair collapsed, and how exactly, Trosper goes on a side-quest at work, trying to contact the company responsible for manufacturing the office chairs.

It’s a satire before it’s a bizarre mystery, and before it goes tonally dark-af.

For a start, he can’t contact the chair company at all. It’s a series of phone call cul-de-sacs, recorded messages, and red herrings.

Within minutes of watching the first episode, I was in flames! Thinking about Event Cinemas jerking my chain, telling me in a series of emails that the digital vouchers my son received for Christmas really do work and it’s driver-error at my end. Even though it’s fucking well not!

Lol.

I was thinking, too, about the time I saw a guy carrying his laptop bag down the road with a zipper that goes across the bottom of the bag. And how I wasn’t angry with the random stranger that was carrying his computer that way. I was mad at the bag manufacturer, and loudly told my wife that I would not rest until I saw the whole line discontinued!

The most I ever did about that was write that line down at the start of a now very long list of my foibles:

I said I was in flames watching The Chair Company. And I was. But I was in near tears of laughter too. At the same time. Absolute joy. The commitment to the bit, the absurdity of the show’s premise, the great lines, and sideline characters, the way the show starts about one thing and then moves so quickly to another. The mundane office space. The co-workers that sit there and don’t really gel but sit there still because that is what they do. I mean this is both so over the top and also so completely accurate.

This is parody, and satire, and dark comedy. But it’s still real to me dammit!

This is the closest I’ve felt to being seen on screen since the early days of watching Nathan For You.

As with I Think You Should Leave, there are background characters and bit-part players that covert small screen time into visual gold; great set pieces, pratfalls, physical comedy, sight gags, and funny turns galore. From silly faces and grimacing to just golden line delivery.

The show finished, because I binged it in two days, and I was bereft. Yes, there’s the knowledge that there’ll be a season two. It was a cliffhanger ending too, so that much was obvious even if I hadn’t heard about the announcement of more to come.

So I went straight out and reviewed the film’s soundtrack:

There are so many great needle drops — from George Benson’s Breezin’ in the opening scene, to Jim Croce, and many more. The soundtrack is really just the series’ score, which I love. Composer Keegan DeWitt also composed the score to Friendship. But the soundtrack album does contain the treat that is Aimee Mann covering the Carpenters:

I have played this a bunch this last week. Including every time I get or send an email to Event Cinemas.