Critic Reviews

As dramatic as this all sounds, The Chair Company is very much a comedy, and by far the funniest show of the year.

Once more, Robinson shows how good he is at taking common social situations and launching them to absurd heights, leaving us to look up at the sky in a combination of awe and terror as all the pieces come falling around us.

It’s like a sketch that never ends, continually building until the pressure is almost unbearable, and when it pops, it’s a thrill. That it also manages to be a smartly made conspiracy spoof, a biting satire of corporate culture, and a heartwarming family drama is just showing off.

As Ron’s investigations take him further afield—as he finds out just how high this thing goes—The Chair Company takes on a layer of increasingly surreal menace: less Office Space, more Mulholland Drive. .... The a-lotness is very much the point, and the more its steadily spiraling plot unravels, the more sense Robinson’s bug-eyed rantings start to make.

The Chair Company not only finds Robinson delivering some of his most gleefully inspired nonsense to date, but it’s also a vicious parody of so many TV conventions.

Every time I began to worry that Robinson and Kanin should have stuck with the idea of getting in and out quickly with a joke, some jaw-droppingly bizarre thing would happen, and The Chair Company had my attention all over again.

The end result is more of the same inspired lunacy that’s made its headliner a cult comedy hero.

Beyond any one explanation, “The Chair Company” is broad and bizarre enough to embrace them all. Robinson, in spite of his well-earned reputation for playing loud jerks and dumb-dumbs, is a shrewd performer.

The Chair Company proves that his [Tim Robinson's] style of comedy can sustain a full season of a TV show, creating something special and weird that could only have come from him.

Fans of I Think You Should Leave, Robinson and Kanin’s cheerfully bizarre sketch-comedy series, will find The Chair Company suitably weird. Even when the show starts to drag, as one lead after another dead-ends and new questions emerge, it’s hard to drop. What keeps The Chair Company engaging are its spurts of tangential lunacy.