The Chair (2021)

This show is endearing, funny and well-written. Sandra Oh’s acting is top-notch, as always. It has nice balance and flows well for only 6 episodes.

The Chair was a nice surprise for me. While the previews gave me the impression of being more 'woke', ticking the typical boxes and the rest, thankfully this was more human with politics revealing character. Sandra Oh plays a newly-elected chair of Pembroke University, and it is a big deal. She oversees quite a crew with a trio of cantankerous older professors (Balaban, Taylor and Crawford), a young and up-and-coming professor (Mensah)and of course, the love-interest, academic messed-up-prof played by Jay Duplass. On top of that, Oh's Ji-Yoon Kim is a single mother managing a plucky, wise and yet equally difficult adopted daughter. The first episode, you might think, oh no, Cliché-ville, next stop. Duplass's Bill Dobson is too Buster Keaton-drunken mess with a series of vaudeville accidents. Alas, we learn he is a widower. Okay, we can forgive him and when the series gets going, his little academic faux-pas during a lecture - conveniently captured by students with smartphones - lands him in a mess dealing with generation participation-trophy. The faculty politics were captured well here and provided for a great deal of sympathy. Academia is cutthroat and with identity politics the new gauntlet, The Chair actually sympathizes more with the professors dealing with the overly-triggered students. I admired this about the show. The Chair was written and directed to perfectly convey the chaos on campus while givings some rather poignant moments between Oh and Duplass. At the same time, there is a lot here and in six thirty minute episodes, there were moments I wished we could have spent more time with the other characters. Holland Taylor's Joan Hambling offered that perfect balance of being both vulnerable and wry. I wanted to get to know her more. The same with Balaban's Prof. Rentz and Mensah's Yaz McKay. The show offered some good moments, and I wondered why the creator (Amanda Peet here... cool...) and writers weren't writing hour-long episodes to flesh-out these roles. And while the Pembroke students here are basically the angry pitch-fork mob, it would have been nice to have been offered some humanity or at least a lesson for them and their bloodthirsty drive to cancel people and have them fired. The Chair navigates some interesting territory, and perhaps avoiding some depth helps it stay in that comfortable place of seriously light. Overall, a pleasant way to cap off a weekend.