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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
28
Mixed:
8
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Aug 22, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Carganilla's blasé exposition of juvenile sociopathology may even be the finest performance of the whole cast, which is saying something: Oh, Duplass, Taylor and Balaban all are outstanding as they bounce from pratfalls to Chaucer jokes to poignant meditations on adult diapers and other detritus of old age. College, when I was there, wasn't nearly this funny.
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Aug 23, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Within its tight frame, the series packs in more than shows three times its length. It’s particularly rewarding in its portrayal of Ji-Yoon’s personal life. ... What truly sells The Chair, though, is how fast and funny it is while throwing around a legion of informed ideas about a well-trodden subject.
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Aug 19, 2021
Season 1 Review:
This wry, observant portrait of the messy scholars charged with preparing young adults to live lives of purpose — and, ideally, some potential to repay their student loans — makes you wish the semester went on for a little while longer. The exacting vibrancy of the series is matched at every turn by its star, Sandra Oh. ... That fizzy rom-com nestled inside The Chair’s satire of old-school thinking and academic inertia adds another layer of joy to the series.
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The GuardianAug 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It’s a great achievement that none of this feels worthy or didactic. It feels like a genuine exploration, a dramatised discussion of intergenerational differences and divides that few are seeking to take the heat out of and examine with real interest. And it’s funny.
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Aug 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It’s a measure of the script’s intelligence that there are no heavy judgments handed down here on the student’s choice. More impressive still is the portrait of a culture of bottomless sensitivity—now, to be sure, no longer confined to campuses—and the fever swamps to which it can lead. It’s a bleak picture. Still, “The Chair” is full of charm, and a captivating humor.
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Aug 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
In its finest moments, The Chair is a workplace farce doled out in tidy 30-minute increments. ... The Chair’s greatest strength is in where it eventually lands: with an accurate, if heightened, sometimes satirical portrayal of what it’s actually like to chair a department (at least from my experience doing so at a private research university).
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Aug 19, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It’s probably a good sign that my biggest complaint is that we get too little time with this menagerie of flawed yet generally good-hearted characters. The show works as well as it does because it’s richly observed, wittily scripted, brilliantly cast and subtly acted, with a sense of humor that’s both sophisticated and incisive in its skewering of academia’s particular brand of pretentiousness.
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IndieWireAug 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Peet and Wyman, along with series director Daniel Gray Longino, create a welcoming, authentic environment to explore their thesis, and they trust Duplass, Taylor, and especially Oh to convey every thought with the grace and wit it deserves. The limited series may lack the focus and follow-through needed to blow audiences away, but it certainly earned its notable position.
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Aug 19, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Creators Amanda Peet and Annie Wyman keep the show loose enough for cute side storylines — David Duchovny! — but never let things wander aimlessly. With six quick episodes they offer a glimpse at the absurdities of modern academic life and cultural sensitivities, while also dancing on romantic comedy notes. Nice.
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Aug 17, 2021
Season 1 Review:
For all the jagged edges, there’s a sweetness to “The Chair” that works hand-in-hand with a perpetual sense of peril, an insistence on giving everyone a say — much as Ji-Yoon must as part of her new job. As the season progresses, it becomes clear that not everyone will land in the clear, and some blood will spill. There’s something refreshing about this impending doom, and the show’s refusal to enter the realm of happily-ever-after.
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Aug 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
“The Chair” has a lot it wants to address — gender dynamics in academia, cross-cultural adoption, grief and self-destruction, white privilege, wokeness and cancel culture — and it’s probably too much for a six-episode, half-hour show that’s also a romantic comedy. ... To its credit, “The Chair” offers no easy answers. It’s more interested in exploring the complexities of transgression and the multitude of reactions than in villainizing or lionizing the individuals involved.
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Aug 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The best parts of the miniseries involve Ji-Yoon’s life apart from campus. ... Oh utterly disappears into her role, but she’s especially funny and charming in her scenes with Duplass, their sweater-swaddled professors both sporting romantic clouds of dark curls. But the best reason to sit through the anemic first four episodes is for the series’ deepening portrayal of a Korean American woman in situations seldom explored in pop culture.
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TV Guide MagazineAug 12, 2021
Season 1 Review:
I'd love a next season, if there is one to be all about her [Holland Taylor]. [16-29 Aug 2021, p.5]
Aug 4, 2021
Season 1 Review:
As a narrative and a send-up of academia, it's sometimes distractingly loose and ultimately anti-climactic (though it still finds ways to end each episode on a note that almost demands viewers press on right away). But as a rich world stocked with endearingly messed-up characters fumbling their way through some hard choices, it's tough to resist.
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Radio TimesDec 2, 2021
The IndependentAug 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
One of several refreshing qualities in The Chair is that it puts the ostensible outsider immediately in a position of authority. The question for Dr Kim is not how she’ll gain power, but how she’ll wield it. ... But if anything lets The Chair down it’s that it rounds off too many of its sharp edges.
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Aug 17, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Ji-Yoon is meant to be a flawed hero, and there’s a sense from the start that perhaps she’s not as ready to tackle this job as she wants to believe she is. Similarly, The Chair has goals it’s only sometimes equipped to achieve, even though its overall talent level keeps things interesting.
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Aug 12, 2021
Aug 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
“The Chair” is entertaining in a knockabout way, if you don’t look too closely, and Oh is wonderful every minute she’s in it. But I found it frustratingly vague. ... Its attempt to honor multiple points of view, especially surrounding l’affaire Bill, feels more indecisive than incisive, more contradictory than complex. “What is this actually about?” you may wonder.
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