Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | TV | October 13, 2025
It’s hard to say whether HBO’s The Chair Company is an evolution of Tim Robinson’s particular brand of absurdist comedy, or just a perfect distillation of it. You can trace the roots of his new HBO series straight back to the first sketch from the first episode of I Think You Should Leave, his previous joint with co-creator Zach Kanin.
In that sketch, Robinson played a man wrapping up some sort of job interview at a coffee shop. After saying his goodbyes, he attempts to leave by pulling on the front door. It won’t budge, because it’s a push door, as his prospective boss points out. No, it isn’t, Robinson’s character argues. It goes both ways, he insists — and then he proceeds to pull on the door with all his might, until the hinges break and he escapes.
A man so mortified by a casual embarrassment that he attempts to alter reality just to assuage his shame, not realizing he’s creating an even more excruciating situation? That’s the jumping off point of The Chair Company, only here it’s writ large and serialized across eight episodes. Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a project manager at a shopping mall design firm, who has recently been promoted to head up an exciting new development in Ohio. As part of his new role, he’s asked to give a speech at a company-wide project launch presentation, which goes well — until he returns to his seat on the side of the stage. There, in front of everyone — his colleagues, his managers, and his boss, Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips) — Ron takes a terrific fall when his chair collapses to bits beneath him. SPLAT!
Ron, being a typical Robinson character, is unable to laugh it off and move on, the way a more well-adjusted person might. Instead, he fixates and stews, seeking an outlet for his outrage and finding one in the chair’s manufacturer, Tecca. What starts as that most relatable of experiences — trying to submit a complaint to customer service only to be thwarted by non-existent email addresses and unhelpful chatbots — becomes a paranoid rabbit hole Ron dives down headfirst. What if this broken chair wasn’t a fluke but part of some larger … conspiracy?
If this were a sketch, that would be the end of it, just Ron assigning intent and blame to one of life’s banal inconveniences as his obsession awkwardly spirals. Given a feature-length runtime, his obsession would proceed to destabilize his entire existence (see: Friendship, starring Robinson and written/directed by Andrew DeYoung, who serves as a producer and director here). But this is a series, and it needs one extra hook to give it enough runway to justify the episode count, so here’s the kicker:
Ron isn’t entirely wrong. Something fishy is going on with the chair company, as evidenced by some dude assaulting him in a parking lot and warning him to stop digging. As Ron looks on bewildered at the stranger fleeing bare-chested into the night, his shirt still clutched in Ron’s hand, a quirk of a smile flashes across Ron’s face. Vindication — his obsession lives on, just as he was on the cusp of shaking it off.
Whether Ron manages to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, and regardless of what he finds in that rabbit hole, his existence will suffer. The seeds of his instability have already been planted in the premiere. In the very first scene, his wife Barb (Lake Bell) offers a toast to Ron’s recent success, in front of his kids Seth and Natalie (Will Price, Sophia Lillis). She notes that Ron has weathered his share of ups and downs these last few years and that it hasn’t been easy. We find out later what some of that turbulence may have been when Ron’s manager talks about how she went to bat for him on this project despite the company’s misgivings — something about him taking a year off to start a Jeep Tours adventure company and mortgaging his house to build nothing more than a rope bridge in the woods.
Meanwhile, as his paranoid mania begins to set in, Ron rips a lanyard off one colleague’s neck and is reported to HR by another because he accidentally saw up her skirt when he fell. And that’s all before he knew he was onto something! How his family and work life suffer as his obsessive investigation continues will surely be excruciating. I can’t wait.
Fans of Tim Robinson will enjoy The Chair Company, of that I’m sure. Ron’s bluster and insecurity, and the escalating misadventures they lead to, are immediately familiar, tracing back even to Detroiters. I’m curious whether the conspiracy angle, the underlying mystery of it all, will be enough to hook viewers who otherwise might not be patient with Robinson’s cringe schtick, just as I’m curious to see how that schtick wears on across a full serialized season. As someone who historically enjoys recoiling in my seat and watching through my fingers as Tim Robinson napalms his fictional life, though, I’m already entirely in the bag for this one.
