Way back in 2007, a sketch from the Adult Swim series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! gave us a disturbing glimpse into our automated future.
The segment finds Eric Wareheim (one half of the comedic duo also featuring Tim Heidecker) trying to open a bank account at an ATM-like terminal that promises an “easy interface” and, more importantly, “no human interaction.” As he tries to enter his personal details, the program goes off the rails. “Do you live in a hole, or a boat?” it asks. “Neither,” Eric replies. “OK,” says the machine. “I didn’t get that. I think you chose boat. Is that right?” It ignores Eric’s mounting frustration, asking questions about whether his boat is used for commercial fishing. Eric keeps looking around for an actual person to reason with; nobody comes to the rescue. By the end, the bot has legally changed his wife’s name and mailed her a pornographic movie.
Almost two decades later, the absurdist DNA of Tim and Eric endures in the cringe comedy of Tim Robinson and creative partner Zach Kanin, who gave us the Netflix breakout hit I Think You Should Leave. (Indeed, Heidecker even makes several guest appearances on that show, once as a consummately annoying jazz nerd.) It’s their latest series, however, that is spiritually related to the prophetic ATM scenario, dramatizing the widespread failure of both mundane objects and advanced technologies everywhere in contemporary life. While not remotely realistic, The Chair Company, streaming on HBO Max, is a painfully precise distillation of how nothing seems to work as designed anymore.
The series presents a paranoid twist on the signature style of Robinson and Kanin, led by Robinson as Ron Trosper, a suburban husband and father spearheading a mall project in Canton, Ohio, after a big promotion at a property developer. Despite these successes at work, Ron scans as a discomfited and undistinguished middle manager. Worse, he knows it, having returned to the company with his tail between his legs following a disastrous solo business venture. As a result, he’s all jitters when it’s time to give a major presentation to the whole firm.
Miraculously, it goes off without a hitch. Then Ron strides across the stage and sits down on an office chair that collapses into pieces underneath, leaving him sprawled on his back, dazed, and humiliated before his bosses and subordinates. Though he first tries to play off the incident with good humor, it continues to gnaw at him, soon inspiring an ill-conceived investigation into the shadowy manufacturer of the faulty chair.
As with I Think You Should Leave, the scenes of acute awkwardness and anxiety that pile up in The Chair Company will not be everyone’s cup of tea. The latter show also lacks the former’s lightning pace — ITYSL pinballs from one bite-sized premise to another, whereas this tense thriller offers no reprieve from Ron’s descent into self-destructive obsession, nor from the increasingly impractical web of lies he must maintain to keep his family and colleagues from learning about his amateur sleuthing. For some, this is simply too stressful to stomach.
It’s perhaps somewhat surprising, then, that The Chair Company is a hit for HBO Max, currently ranking as the second-most watched show on the streamer (behind IT: Welcome to Derry) and maintaining a perfect critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Could it be that audiences have latched onto something more than the spectacle of Ron alternately flipping out and making poor attempts to conceal his panic attacks? Just what, exactly, is so relatable about the slapstick odyssey of this unfortunate white-collar dweeb?
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A throwaway gag in the very first episode offers one potential answer. There’s a hard cut to Ron in bed with his wife, settling in under the covers. He disturbs the peaceful domestic moment by suddenly thrashing his pillow. “I swear I have the worst pillow in town!” he bellows. This is the single line and the entire action of the scene before we cut to the following day.
Plot-wise, there is no justification for this snippet, yet it feels like a skeleton key to the larger narrative, which will find Ron obstructed and aggravated at every turn by stuff that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. He frantically scrolls and clicks through misleading corporate websites, installs an ineffective home security system, and gets stuck on hold with a dead-end customer service line for eight hours, trapped in an endless loop of the brand’s crappy jingle.
Our hapless non-hero sees each setback as part of a deliberate scheme to prevent him from discovering the truth of what happened with the defective chair and securing a simple apology. That conspiracist angle yields hilarious misadventures, but the really dark joke is that the rest of us deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis in 2025.
The tech critic Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the intentional degradation of digital platforms by companies seeking profit over user satisfaction. This principle has certain offline echoes, including “calculated misery,” the term describing how airlines inflict new forms of pain and inconvenience until passengers will pay extra to avoid luggage limits and reduced legroom. As The Chair Company introduces a killer ensemble of uniquely insane characters, this late-capitalist discontent is always simmering under the surface.
Take another example: Early into his search for someone he might hold accountable for the chair catastrophe, Ron is attacked and threatened by a man who tells him to quit snooping around. Ron chases him but only succeeds in pulling off his assailant’s shirt, which he traces to a local store. There, an affected salesman assures him he knows the shirt’s owner, adding that the guy will certainly attend the next meeting of the shop’s “members.” He says that Ron has to sign up for a membership himself in order to attend.
Ron reluctantly does so, aghast at the $65 fee (“That’s cheap,” the retail worker replies haughtily), and immediately afterward realizes he’s been had. The salesman confirms that he lied to sell a membership. As Ron storms out of the shop, his phone is already blowing up with dozens of text alerts about the next shirt club meeting.
A viewer can simultaneously laugh at the implausibility here — what clothing brand has “members”? — and the increasingly common horrors of being forced into another lousy subscription service or bombarded with spam messages. Ours is an age of never-ending “Scam Likely” calls and so many proliferating platforms that we need separate apps to keep track of how much we’re spending for continued access to them. In fact, a week and a half after The Chair Company premiered, HBO Max hiked its monthly prices for every plan.
By the midpoint of the season, Ron is facing blowback from the mysterious cabal he hopes to expose. Do they menace him with their potential for violence? Not really. Instead, they set up a bogus email account in his name and send an inappropriate email to his CEO demanding a raise — the irritated head of the company doesn’t for a second entertain the idea that an impostor may be looking to tarnish his employee’s reputation. Ron’s unseen tormenters also submit applications on his behalf to modeling agencies, prompting a series of rejection calls (one agent tells him his face is “a bit too extreme”), and lure an eBay bidder to his house with a fake listing for a valuable piece of Beatles memorabilia. (The man explodes with verbal abuse when Ron insists he has no idea what he’s talking about.)
The ease with which the villains of The Chair Company steal Ron’s identity for the purposes of this petty harassment campaign is another measure of the enshittification haunting him throughout his waking nightmare. That his world is falling apart not just because of his stubborn pursuit of justice but a breakdown in the technological infrastructure that governs American life stirs our own dread of societal decline. Any comfort and safety in our present consumer culture is amazingly fragile, we realize, and can be shattered with a few little glitches.
It’s an idea that may trouble you the next time you find yourself in a dispute with the self-checkout machine at the supermarket, or locked out of your bank account because you mistyped your password a couple of times, or stuck talking to an AI assistant — one of which so enrages Ron that he types “Fuck you” in response to its canned platitudes. Against a flood of indignities disguised as convenience, do we have any recourse beyond such an impotent gesture? If not, you at least have to laugh.
From Rolling Stone US
