‘The Chair Company’ Season 1 Review: A Middle-Manager’s Struggle to Manage Entropy

Tim Robinson is having quite a year, and between him and Nathan Fielder, HBO maintains its dignity with respect to its offerings in 2025. The show now renewed for Season 2, deals with an obsessive and paranoid Ron Trosper, myopic to a point of silliness, who after suffering a public embarassment due to the Chair-accident, digs down so deep that it starts to look like up to him.

A middle-manager at a retail development firm, Ron Trosper (Robinson) at first seems like a man who got his life together: a loving family, daughter about to be married and his subsequent promotion at the firm to oversee the construction of a mall; and then happens the spark that sets it all off: his chair breaks right on the day of his promotion, marring his dignity by humiliation, setting Trosper on a labyrinthine path to uncover the conspiracy, leading him to investigate the chair company: TECCA.

Joining Trosper in the journey, not out of responsibility, not out of respect either, but out of something, is Mike Santini—played by Joseph Tudisco in such a scene stealing way—not exactly a Sanchez to Trosper’s paranoid Quixote, but by a stretch of argument in one way or another a projection of Trosper’s unchecked anxieties, the miniscule becoming macro and the familial macro becoming miniscule, a man possessed by his own ideas.

Together they are on the search for truth, driven by delirium and delusion, Ron Trosper is like a spinning top, momentarily getting tipsy and turvy but rest is not a word in his dictionary. Verily, the show is edited in a way that imparts a lot of momentum to the show, the comedy—riding a sine-wave of dumb/goofy and genius—acts as a catalyst, propelling the show forward with a ferocity that leaves little to no breathing room, reaching its apotheosis in Episode 5, pure manic After Hours-esque energy.

What’s more is that the sound design is consistently good throughout the show, while the direction gets jankier in parts; and the Aimee Mann’s cover of “Rainy Days and Mondays” is a treat for the ears. What Tim Robinson cutlivates here is a goofy field not exactly going for yield per acre but sketch per inch, the show goes off on tangents every chance it gets in favor for absurdly hilarious comedy.

Ron Trosper not exactly mirrors but reminds me of (out of all Thomas Pynchon protagonists) Oedipa Maas in terms of his struggle to manage the entropy, the obsessive search for truth, a paranoid mind trying to uncover a conspiracy; and needless to say, if you dig Pynchon, or have atleast liked The Crying Of Lot 49 in particular, then oboy, this is the show for you!

The Chair Company is created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, directed by Andrew DeYoung and Aaron Schimberg, and stars Robinson, Lake Bell, Sophia Lillis, Will Price, Joseph Tudisco, and Connor O’Malley.

Watch The Chair Company on HBO and HBO Max below:

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