TV Review: The Chair Is A Dramedy Win For Netflix
Watching The Chair, I flashed back to my private, liberal education, perusing The English Lit Halls where Chaucer was King, and the my Caribbean Lit class rocked the administration’s world for its “diversity.” All these elements brew in Netflix’s The Chair, as Sandra Oh becomes Jin-Yoon Kim: the first woman and Asian/WOC to head a department burdened with cutbacks and old ideas that in order to take literature seriously you have to be as dry a desert in 112 degrees.
I always wondered why people thought to take life seriously, you have to be so “serious.” Whoa! Am I making a Joker reference? Okay, but beyond that, The Chair displays the difficulties of not only being a woman and a WOC heading an institution with literal history of prejudice against your community, but also leading a group of people that presume hard work has to be so hard. In essence, Jin-Yoon’s biggest clash is that, frankly, this department is joyless. From Bob Balaban’s Elliot to David Morse’s Dean Larson, you wonder when was the last time someone was invited to a birthday party or made a child smile. They go by their days fantasizing about authors that one must ask how “lit” their own lives were as broke paupers in 1548 England. Thus, when you base your life off of someone else’s work, what does your own life’s work mean?
Okay, it seems I am a questionnaire because I am asking big, existential Q’s but I liked that The Chair is, technically, a series of existential crises meeting at the teacher’s lounge. Moreover, it proves a point/ commonground that people often miss when they think of diversity and adding “others” to their mix: nobody likes their lives, which is why they want the chance to better them. Jay Duplass’ hapless Bill has lost his wife and rock and is now sending his only child to college. When his co-dependency withdrawal is at an all-time high between him, his now gone daughter, and the ghost of his wife he makes a drunken, poor choice to remember he does have value and nearly brings the whole ENG department down with him. Meanwhile, the smart spark that is Nana Mensah’s Yaz fights to have her worth seen against the dry Elliot, and the hilarious Holland Taylor’s Joan needs to go all Samantha in Sex and The City because she has quieted her fierceness to find out which students are rating her poorly. Yet….. part of the humor and heart of The Chair is in how it unwraps the ways we wrap ourselves in work to leave our personal lives feeling hollow.
Not because this is a “work dramedy,” but you get the feeling, as you watch the show, that each character never goes “home.” Yes, they go back to their house, take a nap, binge-watch Netflix, and even defrost a nice, frozen dinner, but they never connect or get comfortable with anything beyond a fresh new syllabus and a student’s surprisingly thoughtful answer. Thus, The Chair finds its laughs and woes in the epiphany that even I, in my brief stint as a teacher had to undergo: there has to be more to learn from life beyond a classroom. The Chair premieres on Netflix August 20.
