Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company Is Curb Your Enthusiasm for the Conspiracy Dad

Ron Trosper is losing it. The Chair Company, an HBO comedy that premieres on Oct. 12, traces the unraveling of this suburban family man, played by co-creator Tim Robinson, who believes he’s stumbled upon a criminal conspiracy following a minor workplace humiliation. But that conspiracy tends to manifest in the form of universal contemporary annoyances. “You can’t get a hold of anybody,” Ron rants after his investigation leads him into customer-service hell. “That’s the problem with the world today. People make garbage, and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain, you can’t get an apology. I wanna scream at ’em!” The character will be familiar to anyone who knows Robinson’s work. In his Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave and recent feature Friendship, the comedian portrays men who are hilariously, uncontrollably angry for reasons they don’t seem to fully understand. In his nitpicking and narcissism, the relatability of his grievances and his unhinged methods of redressing them, Ron also resembles a younger, Middle American version of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm antihero. He’s a great character—one portrayed with the explosive mix of awkwardness and rage Robinson has perfected and placed in situations that are funny because they’re absurd, but also because, despite their surreal trappings, they speak to modern discontents. It’s all just entertaining enough to make up for the show’s scattershot storytelling. Ron is, at once, an average guy and a mess of insecurities. At home, he’s overshadowed by an impressive wife (Lake Bell) and teenage son (Will Price), as well as his daughter’s (Sophia Lillis) upcoming wedding. (She and her wife-to-be want to marry in a “haunted barn.”) Now that his dream business venture has failed, he has returned to a stressful job at a construction company. All it takes is one blip to send him down the rabbit hole. Sometimes his quest for the truth takes the shape of a prototypical thriller—rendezvous at dive bars, threats issued by shadowy goons in parking lots. Other times, Ron is a terminally online Larry, typing screeds into customer support forms and cursing out chatbots. Robinson’s style of comedy may not be best suited to longform narrative. Writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship, which cast him as a lonely guy who befriends, alienates, then becomes fixated on a cool neighbor (Paul Rudd), has some great moments but falters midway through due to a predictable plot. In the six Chair Company episodes I screened (out of eight), Robinson and co-creator Zach Kanin don’t make the conspiracy thriller funny so much as they use its tropes to connect characters and situations that are, in themselves, very funny. Robinson has a genius for channeling society’s ambient toxic vibes, in abstract but eerily evocative ways, through his odd alter egos. Friendship is a funhouse mirror of the male loneliness crisis. Yet his sensibility is most potent in the concise scenarios of I Think You Should Leave. From the guy who won’t stop making filthy comments on an “adult” ghost tour to the one in the hot dog costume who insists he had nothing to do with the crash of a hot-dog-shaped car, these characters embody the anger, mendacity, immaturity, and allergy to accountability that define so many of today’s most powerful men without explicitly addressing politics. The Chair Company’s hero is the other side of that coin, a disempowered man whose earnestness brings him only embarrassment and whose attempts to find someone to blame for his misery only dig him deeper into it. Ron’s crusade against corporate shadiness (and shoddiness) never generates much suspense. But whether he strikes you as an everyman Larry David or as a modern-day David taking on a faceless Goliath, his plight is bound to resonate.