Review of The Chair Season 1

The Chair (Netflix)-Many dramas are so complex these days in their serialized world-building that they have a slow burn where you have to be patient for a bit until you're actually enjoying the show. The Chair's greatest asset is how it can be enjoyed almost immediately because its characters are very provocative and contrast well with one another right out of the gate.

Sandra Oh stars as Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim who begins the series with a pep in her step as she has  been appointed chair of a prestigious college’s English department. The show might have the veneer of a “Downtown Abbey” or a “Crown” in its stateliness but it presents academia as a brutal game of dog-eat-dog in “Ozark” or “Breaking Bad” territory where everyone is incentivized to deliver Dr. Kim’s head on a platter.

Of course, anyone with a cursory familiarity with the current state of academia knows that it is ripe for this kind of high stakes drama. There's declining revenues for brick and mortar institutions, the struggle for liberal arts to compete with STEM disciplines for funding, vastly changing political and social mores (AKA the rise of cancel culture, more on that later), and the wasteful spending for athletics and extravagant architecture. These issues are interwoven into the drama as well as can be within a criminally short six-episode arc.

Like an Aaron Sorkin drama, everyone is articulate and well-poised because, hey, they’re English teachers. But there’s a clear exception out of the gate in the slovenly mess Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass). Dobson holds the distinction of being a popular author though he's still reeling from the death of his wife and he's barely holding it together. Think Robin Williams’ “Dead Poets Society” character if that character was drunkedly reciting odes while urinating into a trash can.

We also have a trio of old fogies who are in danger of being put to pasture by the Dean for drawing big salaries and not having high enrollments. None of them come off looking particularly capable and it's probably not coincidental that they are all white (believe me, there are plenty of boring old dinosaurs of all ages in academia). The ring master of this trio, Elliot Rentz (Bob Balaban) talks at three miles an hour and wears a bow tie and basically has a sign that says “I was last seen as cool 70 years ago.” He’s joined by a professor, Joan Hambling (Holland Taylor), whose flighty schemes and inability to connect to the internet bring a lot of comic mileage.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a young black professor who caters to student wokeness and short-attention spans, Yaz McKay (Nana Mensah). If you want your Moby Dick analysis filled with raps about the patriarchy, this is the class for you.

To some like me, “The Chair” might be guilty of perpetuating the oversimplification of portraying all white people as being deterrents to progress, and black people being breaths of fresh air. The pervading fear of death by cancel culture is also something that is dealt with in full force here among other issues. One scene, portraying a town hall between Dobson and several students to whom he accidentally caused offense, escalates into a full-on nightmare reminiscent of a twitter mob. That the discourse in that scene eventually becomes governed be whoever yells loudest is pretty brutal to watch.  

Similarly, others who place heavy emphasis on hierarchies of privilege as definitive of how to decipher society might be equally unsettled by seeing a protagonist defending the careers of the failing white side characters. If nothing else, there is plenty of merit to that argument from a capitalist perspective.

In other words, “The Chair” is an equal opportunity provoker and shows that are this intelligently provocative are rare. Whether the show paints one side of this divide with too broad of a stroke or not, the overriding takeaway of Dr. Kim fighting for everyone in her flock has a unifying quality that’s enough to get past any queasy scene.

If there’s one major shortfall in the series, it’s the running time. I’ve rarely seen it as my role to critique the length of a series but the running time of just six half-hour episodes simply undercooks nearly every major storyline.