The Chair Company

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There’s no mistaking who created this show, and I have to imagine that your mileage with it will vary with your tolerance for Robinson’s onscreen persona and his and Kanin’s knack for digging that persona into deep, deep, deep holes.

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.

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.

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.

An incendiary, violently funny nightmare, The Chair Company gifts us Tim Robinson at the top of his strange, single-player game. There is nobody doing what he does. And we, thankfully, have to live with that.

“The Chair Company” is an endurance test. If that sounds unpleasant, you may not be cut out for Robinson’s brand of comedy. But those who are familiar with and enjoy Robinson’s puckering brand of cringe are probably up for the challenge — which it is, in the best way.

All comedy is essentially about surprises and in The Chair Company, you can’t tell exactly when the next massive, stupid laugh is coming. Ron’s colleagues are just the right amount of wacky, too.

This comedy might not be to everyone’s taste and at times it feels to be stretched too thinly over so many episodes. But it has many layers and deserves plaudits for being utterly original in a time when so much isn’t.

Sometimes as absurdly funny as “I Think You Should Leave” and sometimes deeper — although sometimes, it just feels longer.

The Chair Company is a funny parody of conspiracy thrillers that works on a number of levels, thanks to the clever writing of Tim Robinson, Zach Kanin, and their writing team.

Tim Robinson returns with another hilarious cringe comedy, but the emphasis is on cringe, which makes “The Chair Company” an acquired taste that not everyone will want to acquire.

The darkness lurking under all the humor makes "The Chair Company" far more interesting than one might expect. It's the deranged comedy for our deranged times.

Like most of their work, it sometimes stretches believability to try and get a laugh, but it’s a captivatingly strange piece of work, a show that feels like it reaches for commentary in a way that these guys haven’t really done before.

Miraculously, even improbably, it all holds together. The Chair Company coheres into a gestalt, a whole that’s somehow greater than the sum of its absurdities. It’s a more confident expansion of Robinson and Kanin’s sensibility than Friendship

Robinson and Kanin have yet again found a great playground for Robinson’s antics to run wild, and it’s impressive how they’re able to stretch out this joke for an entire season, and have it remain just as funny throughout. The Chair Company is a strange adventure, but with Robinson at the helm, it’s one definitely worth going on.

If you’re already on his vibe, you’ll find a lot to laugh – and scream – about in this hybrid comedy-thriller that exists at the midpoint of sitcom and extended I Think You Should Leave sketch. More than anything, it shows Robinson isn’t just a one-trick pony, and may in fact be the perfect addition to HBO’s comedy line-up alongside Danny McBride and Nathan Fielder.

It’s unlikely to win Robinson any new converts — but those already on board will be more than happy enough to make up for it.

“The Chair Company,” created by Robinson and his longtime collaborator Zach Kanin, often feels like a story making itself up as it goes along. Narrative cohesion and integrity aren’t its strong suits, but I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be. It’s a chaotic show about the chaos that unfolds between our ears and out into the world we must navigate every day.