Tim Robinson Sits in a World of Paranoid Conspiracies in HBO’s ‘The Chair Company’ | TV/Streaming

Director Andrew DeYoung (“Friendship”) and “I Think You Should Leave” collaborators Zach Kanin and Tim Robinson continue their exploration of dysfunctional masculinity in suburban America in the always funny “The Chair Company,” premiering on HBO Sunday. Like most of their work, it’s sometimes hard to try and get a laugh, but it’s a strange and gripping work, a show that feels like it’s soliciting feedback in a way these guys haven’t really done before, becoming a study in how paranoia, conspiracies, and feelings of inadequacy can coalesce into something dangerous in the male psyche. It’s a show that plays out alternately as a mystery and a study about a man going crazy. It could be both.

The long, hilarious tagline for “The Chair Company” says it all while saying nothing, which is fitting for the series: “There’s a world beneath the surface and only Ron has any idea of ​​it. And sometimes the two worlds collide, and sometimes they don’t. Ron keeps them at arm’s length from each other. Watch each week to find out when he can and when he can’t.”

Ron Trosper (Robinson) works at a company where he leads a team planning the construction of a local shopping center in suburban Ohio. What should be a successful time in Ron’s life is thrown into total chaos during an office meeting to celebrate the project when, well, something happens and HBO has asked not to be spoiled, making the what of this series difficult to unpack. Let’s just say it’s one of those embarrassing moments that can so easily become an object of obsession, the kind of thing that keeps you up at night and allows you to ignore everything else in your life. And that sends Ron down a rabbit hole of “explaining” why it happened. We are often told in life that everything happens for a reason. Ron needs to know the reason.

Robinson understands the kind of guy who focuses so much on one thing that the things that matter, like his job and his family, become dangerously ignored. The mall project suffers, his children suffer, his wife suffers, all while Ron searches for answers. It’s his best performance to date as Robinson finds layers that the “Friendship” storyline didn’t really allow for, in that he’s allowed to play a more ordinary, approachable guy who goes crazy…maybe.

Scenes between Ron and his daughter Natalie (Sophia Lillis) counter the show’s constantly twisting mysteries, which are clearly meant to resonate with a generation of young people who have had to smile and nod at the insanity their parents have become obsessed with on social media today. While Robinson and Kanin have a history of pushing their humor into surreal and unbelievable corners of comedy, “The Chair Company” is at its best when it stays connected to today’s viral madness, whether through the eyes of Natalie or Ron. We all have people in our lives who have gone down rabbit holes that allow them to believe something they previously thought was impossible (or maybe we’ve done it once or twice ourselves). This guy does it all his life.

“The Chair Company” also deftly weaves the issues of modern frustration with the way things actually happen in Ron’s mental decline. When he yells into a phone that he can never speak to anyone at a company he needs to reach for his investigation, he speaks for millions of us who are tired of automated contact lines and endless on-hold music. Robinson’s series is at its best when it walks a tightrope between its creator’s undeniably outlandish sense of humor and something that feels like it’s about more than this specific man-child.

There was a picture late in the season that reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and I realized how much the two projects have in common. These are two stories of male Alices who dive into Wonderland and feel carried by their own insecurities. HBO hasn’t sent the finale to press, but if Ron ends up in a masked orgy, I might be heading down my own conspiracy rabbit hole.

Seven episodes screened for review. Premieres on HBO October 12.