TL;DR: Tim Robinson builds a conspiracy out of shame in The Chair Company, a surreal HBO comedy that turns social anxiety into high art. It’s weird, wild, and painfully relatable—a must-watch for fans of I Think You Should Leave.

There’s a particular flavor of anxiety that only Tim Robinson can bottle. It’s that fizzing, unbearable, utterly human cocktail of embarrassment, defensiveness, and misplaced confidence that makes you scream-laugh into a pillow at 1 a.m. while scrolling through old I Think You Should Leave clips. And in HBO’s The Chair Company, Robinson has done something wild: he’s stretched that feeling into an entire serialized fever dream of a show—a suburban nightmare disguised as a midwestern conspiracy theory, wrapped in the padded vinyl of a corporate breakroom chair.

The Chair Company is, on paper, about an everyman named Ron Trosper. He has the kind of life that looks enviably normal from across the street: a loving wife (Lake Bell, in her best deadpan mode), a daughter (Sophia Lillis) about to get married, a son (Will Price) with hoop dreams, and a stable job managing a mall project in Canton, Ohio. But, of course, this is a Tim Robinson world. Stability isn’t just fragile here—it’s a prank. One humiliating accident (which HBO has wisely asked critics not to spoil) detonates Ron’s sense of normalcy, and suddenly he’s seeing coded messages in office memos, hidden meanings in chair designs, and corporate puppeteers behind every piece of bad luck.

That premise alone would be solid dark comedy, but Robinson and co-creator Zach Kanin aren’t interested in normal comedy. They want to make you squirm. The Chair Company takes the gnawing shame of one bad day at work and drags it into absurdist purgatory. You know that moment when you trip in front of people and try to play it off, but your brain replays it for the next six years? Imagine if that mental replay started whispering back.

From its first episode, The Chair Company feels like the spiritual cousin to I Think You Should Leave. Every scene teeters on the edge of too-long, every argument spirals into a mini-existential crisis, and every laugh is just a half-step away from horror. A simple trip to a menswear store turns into a philosophical meltdown about a “members-only” club that may or may not exist. A party about “mistakes” morphs into a cultish performance piece about guilt and masculinity. There’s even a ten-minute debate about soup stains that somehow ends with a police report. Each of these tangents builds toward something oddly tender: a portrait of how one man’s paranoia becomes the only way he can make sense of being humiliated.

What makes it all hit harder is how familiar Ron’s descent feels in 2025. The Chair Company might not directly mention the internet, but it feels like the internet—the endless clicking, the paranoia, the way one embarrassing post or email can mutate into an entire identity crisis. One early scene, in which Ron tries to contact a mysterious furniture supplier called Tecca, might be one of the most perfectly infuriating depictions of modern digital life ever filmed. The phone number doesn’t work. The chatbot keeps looping him back to the homepage. The email address is fake. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare that anyone who’s tried to cancel a subscription or reach tech support will instantly recognize.

But Robinson uses that absurdity to aim at something bigger: the way conspiracy thinking and embarrassment often sprout from the same soil. Ron isn’t just investigating Tecca—he’s investigating why the universe humiliated him, why he’s not the competent family man he thought he was. In his search for hidden enemies, he becomes one of those armchair detectives we all see online, convinced the government is communicating through barcodes or that chairs are mind-control devices. The show never fully confirms whether Ron is right or delusional—and that ambiguity is the point. The deeper he goes, the more his family drifts, until his detective work looks less like justice and more like self-destruction.

And yet, it’s still funny. Robinson’s gift is finding humor in humiliation without cruelty. Ron’s breakdown isn’t played for cheap laughs; it’s a painfully relatable study of how we build meaning from chaos. Every shout, every awkward pause, every desperate justification feels like it’s drawn from real life—that twitchy need to make sense of something nonsensical. Lake Bell grounds the madness beautifully, her dry delivery cutting through Ron’s spirals with the weary patience of someone who loves a man she no longer recognizes. Sophia Lillis and Will Price bring an aching realism to the family scenes, especially as Ron’s obsession starts to infect their lives too.

The Chair Company isn’t perfect. Its pacing can wobble, especially in the middle episodes, where the line between absurdity and surrealism starts to blur into repetition. But that might be part of the design—this is a show about being trapped in your own loop, after all. Robinson’s commitment to the bit, his ability to stretch discomfort into art, makes even the slower stretches worth watching.

By the final episode, The Chair Company has transformed from a comedy about chairs into a surprisingly emotional elegy for sanity. It asks what happens when you can no longer trust your own embarrassment—when the shame that used to fade just hardens into paranoia. And it does all of that while making you laugh until your ribs hurt. It’s bleak, brilliant, and deeply, stupidly human.

Verdict:

The Chair Company is Tim Robinson at his most unhinged and most empathetic—a surreal, hilarious, and occasionally heartbreaking satire of modern anxiety. It weaponizes embarrassment into something almost beautiful: a mirror for our collective meltdown in the digital age.