With hypersensitive snowflake American students on the warpath, surely Netflix six-parter The Chair is a horror series? A cautionary tale to terrify anyone over thirty? Nearly, it’s a comedy drama aka quite amusing drama, with attempted murder of a kind, to someones’s character and academic career. And like the zombies in The Walking Dead, the rampaging hordes serve mostly as background noise for a scared English department to cope with and mollify as they struggle with their own problems.
Heading up the literature professors of fictional sub-Ivy league Pembroke College is always likeable Sandra Oh as Dr Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman and person of colour to be elected as department chair, after the implosion of its former occupant, Bill Dobson played by Transparent’s Jay Douglass. Dr Kim has her hands full, juggling an abundance of costly ageing and seemingly irrelevant faculty staff, declining enrolment, and financial cuts, whilst being a single mother to her troubled adopted child, and supporting her friend and former lover, the doubly grieving Bill, who’s wife has passed away and college bound daughter gone away.
With Sandra Oh also presently starring in not one but two other hit shows, Killing Eve and Invincible, it can’t be a stretch to portray someone that busy, but Ji-Yoon’s permanently flustered state ratchets up a notch after Bill is filmed doing a Sieg Heil that rapidly becomes a meme and sparks protests. That the clip’s taken out of context from one of Bill’s lectures, where he uses it to punctuate a point about the connection between Fascism and Absurdism, is what a cleverer person than I might refer to as dramatic irony, or illustrative, or something or another.
That cleverer person is co-creator and writer Annie Julia Wyman, surely channelling her own experiences from teaching at Harvard, which whilst adding authenticity to the setting, also illustrates a danger from those that study and teach art, in that they replicate it. This will be all too apparent to anyone who’s read Wonder Boys, or watched the excellent Michael Douglas adaptation. Hell, it’s even apparent to the writers, with an illicit joint smoked in the greenhouse at a faculty party referred to as a cliche.
I guess such a patriarchal reference itself illustrates why an update is necessary, and what the show does an excellent job of is capturing the changing state of higher education, for good and for bad. Co-creator and Hollywood actor Amanda Peet makes her writing debut here, and whilst the two pratfalls in the first ten minutes aren’t inspiring, when the script finds its feet there’s real subtlety and nuance. She must’ve also known what great actors could bring those lines to life, with Holland Taylor in particular digging her teeth into the role of a very long career.
It’s a shame then that overall, especially given the topical subjects broached, there’s just not enough bite. It’s too even-handed, the old and new guard have valid teaching methods, the student’s concerns are well represented, even the Dean isn’t an out and out bad guy. And whilst not horror, there is something missing here. A proper monster.
