In his breakthrough Netflix series, “I Think You Should Leave,” Tim Robinson plays a lot of characters. But really, he plays one. He’s That Guy — a placid-faced, slouchy suburbanite man-child who, beneath his ordinary exterior, is a roiling cauldron of weird obsessions and resentments. Sometimes he runs a cable channel; sometimes he wears a hot dog suit. But he is always That Guy.
You may think this a criticism — it is not. Most comic performers would dream of creating a single character as distinctive, as recognizable, as evocative of the odd, rage-y times we live in. Tim Robinson zeroed in on That Guy, rendered him in many walks of life and turned him into an army.
In “The Chair Company,” beginning Sunday on HBO, That Guy gets his own conspiracy serial. The series, which Robinson created with his longtime collaborator Zach Kanin, is sometimes as absurdly funny as “I Think You Should Leave” and sometimes deeper — although sometimes, it just feels longer.
At first, you might believe that Ron Trosper (Robinson) is exactly as mild-mannered as he appears. He’s a thriving middle manager overseeing the development of a new mall in Ohio. He has a daughter (Sophia Lillis) about to get married; a son (Will Price) readying to graduate high school; and a wife, Barb (Lake Bell), starting her own business. Ron wears a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that have a Clark Kent-izing effect, suggesting that Robinson might, for some reason, be playing a man who has managed to fully grow up.
Ron’s That Guy-ness slips out while he’s at dinner with his family and his waitress mentions that she hasn’t been to a mall in years. He insists she must have — malls are “just more naturalistic now and less intrusive” — but she is sure she hasn’t, and he doubles down. “This is kind of a mall!” he says of the restaurant, which is not in fact a mall.
He is insulted, he is embarrassed, and he is embarrassing to others, but, like all That Guys before him, he cannot let it go. Like a human Yelp review, he burns with the agony of a grievance unsatisfied.
That sort of impulse drives “The Chair Company,” whose instigating incident has been deemed a spoiler. This is just as well, since to describe the plot’s surreal turns would make me sound like a 3-year-old recounting a dream. Suffice it to say that the event leaves Ron humiliated and outraged, and it sends him on a quest for justice that reflects his inner belief that the world is conspiring against him.
The twist, such as it is, is that Ron may kind of be right. The strings that he begins pulling, at the expense of his work and his personal relationships, lead to a netherworld of bogus companies, false identities, inept thugs and weirdly specific porn.
In one sense, Ron is a familiar figure from antihero TV — the man in a midlife crisis seeking purpose, the kind of guy who watches a Jim Croce video on YouTube and ends up hammering out a maudlin comment about how life has let him down. But there is also, in Robinsonian style, something unformed about him. In an early scene, he retreats to his office, crawls under the desk and begins spasming in frustration, like a toddler who hasn’t learned to emotionally self-regulate.
Ron’s detective quest leads him to numerous character types and environments familiar from Robinson’s sketches. He partners in his investigation with Mike (Joseph Tudisco), a sad-sack tough guy who nurses secret heartaches. There are the co-workers with poor senses of boundaries, the devotees of unusual shirt stores. Everyone is a bit off and over-reactive, like people who, after the Covid lockdowns, seemed to have forgotten how to be around other humans.
Robinson’s work also understands the connection between comedy and existential horror. (Take the “I Think You Should Leave” sketch in which a man is terrified by a pig in a Richard Nixon mask into believing there are “monsters on the world.”) “The Chair Company” seems to be trying to pry open the skulls of Robinson’s characters and get a closer look at the boogeymen hiding inside. The show is still bizarrely funny, but there are hints of a richer emotional register and an otherworldly eeriness, as in “Twin Peaks: The Return” or “The Curse.”
“The Chair Company” doesn’t deliver entirely on this approach (though it could yet pay off in the season’s final episode, which HBO did not send for review). For some stretches it feels like a series of “I Think You Should Leave” premises joined by a connective tissue of plot, and the greater length makes the thinness of the supporting characters more conspicuous.
Still, I was drawn in, wondering what strange, sleazy alley this shaggy dog would lead me down next. That Guy, it turns out, can still surprise you.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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