The Chair

The Chair is a modest, satirical comedy, presented in six half-hour episodes on Netflix.  The show doesn't wear out its welcome and its entertaining.  There's nothing significant about the series, but it kept my attention and I enjoyed all episodes -- there's no filler; it's a lean production.  The show demonstrates the virtues of a well-designed script presented in a craftsmanlike manner by accomplished performers.  Curiously, the show is oddly blind about some of its own ideological shortcomings -- a minor defect that is puzzling given the program's sensibility carefully tuned to nuances of political correctness.

The series' premise is that a failing English literature department at a second tier private college appoints a Korean-American woman as its Chair.  The Chair is played by Sandra Oh and she's effective in the role.  The Chair is a striver who has made it to a position of prominence in her department by fortitude, hard-work, and getting along with others -- one has the sense that she has overlooked myriads of insults to reach her position as the tenured chair of English literature.  The Chair has a former boyfriend named Bill, who has just lost his wife and is grieving in an unseemly way.  Bill is an annoying character -- although he's supposedly a fine critic and excellent teacher, we see that he is self-centered and very childish, in fact, a sort of man-child whose antics are supposed to be cute but aren't.  Bill is teaching a class on Death and Modern Literature, but he screws up -- he accidentally shows his snarky, entitled students some nude images of his dead wife taken when she was pregnant.  Then, to compound the insult, he makes an ill-considered reference to Fascism and illustrates his point by clicking his feet together and giving a Nazi salute.  A number of the students film him with their cell-phones and post the image of the Professor's Sieg Heil as an internet meme.  This alarms the Dean who has Bill suspended and, when he makes things worse by refusing to apologize, takes aim at him, targeting him for dismissal.  Banned from campus, Bill babysits The Chair's precocious and malicious five-year-old, a little girl with a foul mouth who makes dirty jokes and terrifies everyone.  Bill, of course, gets along with the child just fine.  (The child was adopted by the Professor, who is single, and is from Oaxaca.  A subplot in the show is the little girl's role as "an ambassador for Mexican culture" at her Spanish immersion language school -- she is supposed to present to the class on the Dia de los Muertos.  This allows her to summon Bill's dead wife in a way that helps the disgraced professor make peace with his loss.)  There are several subplots that flank the main action involving the disciplinary proceedings.  An elderly female Chaucer professor takes revenge on a student who has insulted her on a Rate-your-Professors website.  She has been assigned a basement office in the Campus athletic center and demands that she be restored to an office above-ground.  An effective Black teacher not yet tenured is required to co-teach a class in Melville with an old conservative professor played by Bob Balaban.  This leads to various conflicts and misunderstandings and, ultimately, results in the woman, who is portrayed as the future hope of English literature studies, threatening to take a position offered her at Yale.  (Apparently, she turns the job down because New Haven is an awful place to live, ranked below Fargo, North Dakota, one wag observes).  The African-American teacher is supposed to present a high-profile lecture at the college -- but to gin-up enthusiasm, the school hires David Duchovny to give the lecture.  (Duchovny gets to appear in a self-deprecating role, but, of course, one that permits him to keep his sexual allure unscathed.)  There are some disturbing scenes in which Bill confronts student activists.  These scenes emphasize the self-confident Stalinist tendencies of the students; they become an intelligently braying mob.  Unwittingly, the show gives credence to Donald Trump's absolute refusal to ever apologize about anything:  the mob that wants to flay you alive isn't interested in an apology and there is nothing that you can do to ameliorate their self-righteous rage.  Indeed, the more sincere the apology, the more the mob feels vindicated in their rage.  (This dynamic was on full display in the Andrew Cuomo debacle -- the more he apologized, the more he was vilified.)  Some of the scenes involving the callow student protesters are modestly satirical and could be viewed as poking fun at these sorts of student radicals.  But the show is very politically correct and doesn't want to take sides in the culture wars.  Some parts are underwritten and it's difficult to figure out exactly how some of the subplots are resolved:  Bob Balaban, who is very good, gets almost nothing to say and his "odd couple" act with the Black lady-professor doesn't deliver the fireworks that it promises -- I couldn't exactly figure out what Balaban wrote that was left in the photocopier, a key plot point but one that I didn't understand and, similarly, I'm not sure exactly how the issues with the African-American teacher actually work out.  Oddly enough, I think another half-hour of exposition would have improved the show.  

Curiously, the film's politically correct mask drops when it comes to Korean-Americans.  These people are caricatured in grotesque ways that verge on racism, apparently, not a concern for the writers who conceived this show.  (Korean women are shown to be money-grubbing, rude, backbiting, and vulgar; Korean men are shown as loutish drunks.)  The show also relies on a plot contrivance that is pernicious.  One plot strand is resolved when someone gets a big cash settlement on the basis of being mistreated by his employer.  (Readers may recall that Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty was paid a big settlement on the basis of a phony allegation of sexual harassment -- this rang false in American Beauty and the plot device in The Chair is equally implausible and contrived.)  Scriptwriters treat the civil justice system as a sort of lottery that can be used to deliver big chunks of money when required by a narrative.  It doesn't work that way and, of course, these fictional settlements have a way of haunting real lawyers when clients think that the system will deliver equivalent boons to them.