Chris Sheridan
The following recap contains spoilers for The Chair Company S1E1 “Life Goes By Too F*cking Fast, It Really Does” (written by Tim Robinson & Zach Kanin and directed by Andrew DeYoung).
The Chair Company is the newest outing from Tim Robinson & Zach Kanin (who gifted us with I Think You Should Leave and Detroiters), and I’ve been excited to see what they’ve cooked up since it was announced. With that being said, I am pleased to report that it has been well worth the wait.
“Life Goes By Too F*cking Fast, It Really Does” opens on Ron Trosper (Tim Robinson), his wife Barb (Lake Bell), and his kids Natalie (Sophia Lillis) and Seth (Will Price) out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. After taking a group selfie with the family and being presented with a meal that Ron is delighted over (in a way only Tim Robinson could be), Barb toasts her husband, during which the waitress sneaks over. Ron, distracted, asks her what she’s doing, and she recognizes Seth from his high school basketball performance (his team beat her team last season). Seth redirects the conversation to his father and his experience in shopping malls. The waitress remarks that she hasn’t been to a mall to a while, and Ron counters that she probably has without realizing it. She insists that she hasn’t, but Ron refuses to drop it, insisting that she has definitely been in a mall, even cutting off Natalie when she tries to quietly pull him back and comparing this very restaurant to a sort of mall. The waitress finally relents and steps away. She almost takes the half a deviled egg, but Ron demands she leave it. “This isn’t really a mall, is it?” Seth asks. “No, not really,” Ron says. “But what the f*ck was I supposed to say?” Barb gently tells her husband that he’s just nervous about his upcoming kickoff meeting.
Ron wakes up in the middle of the night, yelling about his uncomfortable pillow (“This thing is made of g*ddamn metal!”)
The next morning at his place of work, Fisher Robay, Ron’s day is off to a rough start as he’s caught behind elderly, slow-moving Doris (Evangeline Johns). He’s summoned to a meeting ahead of the kickoff, and is told that it’s important to make a good impression. Ron psyches himself up in the bathroom, and ends up delivering an excellent presentation at the meeting in front of an appreciative group of coworkers and executives. But as he returns to his office chair on the stage, the chair collapses, sending him tumbling to the ground. Once he’s up and dusted off, the meeting continues, but Ron is in a state of extreme embarrassment, hiding under his desk from his coworkers, ashamed of facing his wife, and unable to sleep that night.
The next day, during a touch-base in his office, Ron’s coworkers joke about the mishap, and Ron joins in until they all get a little too jokey, so he deflects by saying he’s glad it was him because if it was Doris, she would have died. That mostly deflates the vibe, and the team disperses. Glancing out of his office window, Ron catches a glimpse of a janitor carrying a large trash bag across the hallway. He follows the janitor into the empty room used for the kickoff meeting, and finds the remains of the collapsed chair. While taking pictures of it, he comes across a manufacturer placard: Tecca. He’s startled by the janitor, who demands Ron’s phone and asks if he’s taking pictures of his wheelbarrow; the wheelbarrow he’s been told he’s not allowed to have.
Ron races back to his office and Googles Tecca, finding their product page and quickly clicking on the “Contact Us” link. Calling the number, he’s greeted by Carla, from National Business Solutions, which handles orders from Tecca and other companies. She informs him that the call may be recorded for quality and training purposes, and Ron responds that he does not consent to being recorded. He just wants Tecca’s number so he can discuss the problem with the chair, which Carla, after a pause, tells him she is not authorized to give out. Ron starts going off about how weird and dangerous the chair problem is, until he’s interrupted by Brenda (Zuleyma Guevara) reminding him about an upcoming interview for the mall. He insists that he’s getting ready for it.
That night at home, Ron attempts to contact an online agent at Tecca, which is a dead end. After frantically scrolling through multiple pages on the site, he finally finds an email address. He composes an email about “a coworker” falling through a chair, and hits send. He receives an immediate automated response that the address was not found. The next day on the phone, he continues to try to find someone at Tecca to talk to, and is mostly unsuccessful, but the man on the other end tells Ron that he “probably shouldn’t tell [him] this,” but proof of injury would force the attention of Tecca’s legal department. What about if Ron could prove someone was in danger of injury? He glances out of his office window at Doris. This is probably my favorite line of the episode: Someone’s handing Doris a piece of paper, and Doris says, “F*ck! You gave me that paper too hard!”
What follows is Ron concocting schemes to get Doris out of her chair so he can get footage of her walking with her bad hip, but every idea he gets is derailed by someone distracting Doris from getting up, specifically Douglas (James Downey) and his stupid f*cking bubble wand necklace. He finally snaps, yelling at Douglas, ripping the necklace off, and attracting the attention of the entire office. He escapes downstairs before Brenda can confront him about the situation.
Back home, Ron’s going through some images and comes across what appears to be a birthday party at the office. I noted that Douglas appears to be giving Ron a side-eye in the photo, but more important is a Tecca label on the back of an office chair, along with an address. Ron immediately sets off, but not before eating the leftover deviled egg from the restaurant, which is how many days old now?
Arriving at the address, Ron squeezes through the chain-link fence of the abandoned building. He first comes across a copier, inside of which are odd, nude photographs. Across the room is something concealed under a large tarp. Underneath it is what appears to be a large, red sphere. Before Ron can investigate further, the deviled egg comes back to haunt him. Sitting on the toilet, Ron hears approaching footsteps. A flashlight passes underneath the stalls, and a man screams. Ron races out of the building, into his car, and back home.
The next morning, Ron is confronted by Brenda, who asks him why he didn’t hire a security firm for the construction site for the mall, at which some teenagers were drinking with a teacher: a huge legal liability. Brenda challenges Ron over whether he’s capable of handling this job, and Ron insists that he is. With the meeting over, Ron deletes the Tecca photo from his phone and is ready to simply move on with life. Leaving the office for the night and walking to his car, Ron sees a man (Joseph Tudisco) following him. As he picks up speed, so too does the man behind him. Before he can enter his car, the man pushes into him and demands, “Stop looking into the chair company!” and cracks him across the face with a pipe. As the man walks away, Ron gets back up and starts going after the man. The man starts to run away, unbuttoning his shirt. Ron sprints after him, but as he reaches out to grab him, he’s left with just a handful of the man’s shirt, and a lot of questions.
The Chair Company’s pilot episode is extremely promising. I really liked the vibe of one of Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave characters being dropped head-first into a conspiracy thriller—and one that has just enough Robinson/Kanin flavor to make things adequately surreal. The fact that the reason to pull on a thread is because a chair broke when he sat in it, and furthermore how that thread is actually something that’s about to spectacularly unravel, is hilarious. I also was not expecting for the plot to be this dense, and it’s only a half hour of plot so far. It’s time to look forward to Sundays again!
