Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Chair’ On Netflix, Where Sandra Oh Is The First Female English Chair At A Prestigious University

There are many, many institutions of higher learning out there — some even claiming progressive bona fides — that are slow to impart change within their own infrastructures. Tenured professors become stuck in their ways, administrations hire women and people of color at glacial paces. Which is why it’s entirely believable that the situation that Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman have created in their new series The Chair can happen, even in 2021. Read on for more.

THE CHAIR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of what looks like an Ivy League campus in a quaint New England college town.

The Gist: Professor Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh) stares at the hallowed halls of Pembroke University’s English department. She’s been teaching at the prestigious college for over 20 years, but this is her first day as her department’s chair. Remarkably in 2021, Ji-Yoon is the first woman and person of color in the role. This means she gets the big office, with the dark wood paneling and the old portraits of distinguished educators.

In her first meeting as chair, everyone in the department is there… except for Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), the most popular and well-known professor in the department. Longtime professors Joan Hambling (Holland Taylor) and Elliot Rentz (Bob Balaban) are there, as is Yaz McKay (Nana Mensah), the exciting new hire who is the only other POC besides Ji-Yoon on the English staff.

Bill is busy dropping his daughter off at the airport so she can fly to college. She tells her dad that it’s time to “get your shit together.” It’s been a year since his wife and her mother died, and he’s barely been hanging on. He gets drunk at the airport, then can’t find his car. He steals a golf cart and wipes out on a berm. Then he tries walking to class, grabs a scooter, and launches himself into a bush.

Ji-Yoon has other things to deal with on her first day. Dean Paul Larson (David Morse) tells her that, with enrollment way down and budgets tightening, he is looking to cut the three longest-tenured and most expensive teachers — including Joan and Elliot — because their enrollments have been shrinking. The dean tries to persuade Ji-Yoon to ask them to take retirement, but Ji-Yoon tries to get creative in order to retain them.

First, she goes down to Joan’s new office — the administration relocated her to a basement in the gym building — and tells her to read her evaluations. She also combines Elliot’s low-enrollment class with Yaz’s extremely popular class; of course, their teaching styles mesh like oil and duck feathers. Ji-Yoon promises to help Joan with her office issue, but ghosts her at the meeting at the Title IX office because, yet again, Bob’s TA Lila (Mallory Low) can’t find him right before class. When she dredges him up, passed out in her office, he gets to class and starts talking about fascism, and gives a “Heil, Hitler” sign, which of course the students gleefully record on their phones.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Paper Chase but funnier. Community but with a bit more of a privileged air.

Our Take: Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman are the creators of The Chair, and they’ve dreamed up a surprisingly funny and warm look at how the university system can be calcified and slow to change, and even when change happens, it’s fraught with issues. The first episode does a fine job of setting up the main characters and their story arcs, and puts Oh firmly in the center of the storm around her, where she’s trying to keep things from falling apart while trying to impart change in her hidebound department.

This includes her life at home, where she’s a single mother to her daughter Ju-hee (Everly Carganilla). Ji-Yoon adopted Ju-Ju shortly after ending a long-term relationship. Ju-Ju isn’t Korean, which dismays her father (Ji-yong Lee). Habi loves Ju-Ju, but wants to talk to her in Korean, and is frustrated when she doesn’t understand. Ju-Ju thinks of dark stuff and doesn’t seem to crave affection from her mother.

Oh handles all of this chaos with her usual air of authority and exasperation; she is trying to take advantage of the unique opportunity she has to affect change, starting with giving Yaz the distinguished lecturer honor for the year, over objections from the dean and others. It helps that she’s supported by pros like Balaban, who is his stuffy best as the arrogant and stuck-in-his-ways Elliot, and Taylor, who’s Joan isn’t as hidebound as Elliot, but has no problem telling the Title IX administrator that people can see her “fucking fanny” in her short shorts.

Duplass has proven ever since he made his first acting splash in Transparent that he can handle fall-down funny material and then turn on a dome to deeply emotional moments, and he does so here. You can palpably feel the grief he’s going through even while he’s doing funny things like commandeering a kid’s scooter, and you can also see how he considers himself above the usual political BS that comes with being a part of a university’s faculty.

It’s obvious that Peet and Wyman are setting up something between Bill and Ji-Yoon; it’s very apparent that they were “work spouses” when she wasn’t the chair and his wife was still alive, and flirted like work spouses often do. The chemistry between Oh and Duplass makes that more than believable. Was having the attraction there necessary? Maybe not, and the way it is picked up and dropped again throughout the season tells us that even the creators didn’t quite know what to do.

Things go a bit astray as the season goes along, with Bill’s jokey Nazi salute coming back to bite him and a trustee deciding that the year’s distinguished speaker should be a celebrity she ran into at the local farmer’s market — though that celebrity does make a pretty funny guest appearance in one episode. But by making sure Oh’s presence is strong throughout, and not being afraid of pushing the funny parts of the show past the merely amusing — i.e. actually doing things that make you laugh out loud — the parts that don’t make as much creative sense don’t overwhelm the show.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: After Bill does his jokey Hitler salute, we pan back and see members of his class show the video of it on their phones. Something bad is brewing.

Sleeper Star: Ella Rubin plays a student who is a fan of Bill’s; she gives him a ride to school, which puts Ji-Yoon and the administration in an uncomfortable spot. Her character is a bit underserved during the first season, but when she’s on screen, she’s great.

Most Pilot-y Line: None that we could see.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Chair is funny as heck with some earned moments of real emotion, and a killer cast. Six episodes flew by, and we hope to see more of Pembroke’s English department soon.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Chair on Netflix