One of my favourite things to do in the world is make my girlfriend watch a sketch from the Netflix show I Think You Should Leave… With Tim Robinson. I do this probably every six months, knowing deep down she's going to hate it, driven by the tiniest seed of optimism that I'll finally win her round to this strange, occasionally-grating comedy. Most recently, I pulled up a segment set on a Love Island-esque dating series called Summer Loving. In it, Robinson – the niche comedy star, formerly of Saturday Night Live – plays an average guy with limited social skills, which I guess is the alternative comedy equivalent of George Clooney playing a charming, handsome silver fox. It's his one move, and he is incredible at it.
The guy on this occasion, Ronnie, is facing elimination because his prospective love interest thinks he's just on the show to use the zip line in the villa's garden – an accusation that precedes a montage of him riding the zip line over and over again, and a clip of him telling one of his fellow 'summer lovers' that "I just wanna be alone forever". Rather than taking the high road, Ronnie, who is 39, responds like a child: he denies, he lies, he goes on the attack ("Carlos says your face looks like a clock"), and then, when he realises it's game over, he cries. (A lot of Robinson's characters cry, typically when they're called out for their obnoxious behaviour).
Anyway, this attempt ended as all the others have, with me alone laughing and my partner staring at me like, "How did I end up with this fuckin' guy?" And I get it. I have learned the hard way that Tim Robinson is not for everyone. That said… I still believe that he is Adam Sandler for a new generation – just a generation that's a little more fucked up than the one that came before it. Maybe all it'd take to get the sceptics on board is a gateway drug – a show that has the same sense of humour as I Think You Should Leave…, but is just a little more palatable.
Now we have it in the form of The Chair Company, which is airing weekly on Sky Comedy (and streaming on Now). The Chair Company does a lot of the same things as Robinson's other shows, but under the guise of a serialised HBO mystery. In it, Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a property developer who has a beautiful family and is excelling in middle management at a property development firm but, to paraphrase Christopher Moltisanti, appears to be beaten down by the fuckin' regularness of life. In episode one, after delivering a successful speech at a large company meeting, Trosper goes to sit down on stage, only for the chair to collapse underneath him. He brushes it off with a joke – "I guess I shouldn't have had that last Cheez-it this morning" – but inside, he is crumbling. After the incident, he mounts a full-scale vigilante investigation into the company behind the chairs, having convinced himself that it's part of a massive conspiracy, and he gets drawn into a criminal underworld filled with useless, strange men that he has quite a bit in common with.
It's basically an I Think You Should Leave sketch spun out into something much grander. The jokes are largely the same and the killer observations about the mundanity of most social interactions are there, but the production quality is much higher. Robinson and his writing partner Zach Kanin have got the skills to make it work as both a comedy and a mystery – you're never sure if the conspiracy is real or if it exists only in Trosper's head.
As a reference point for the newly initiated, there are shades of Curb Your Enthusiasm here. In that show, Larry David broke social norms because he thought he was right – he had a set of rules to live by, and he stuck to it. Here, Robinson's men just don't have a handle on the rules at all. And as a result, you can't help but sympathise with them, even when you're mortified.
That's also the case in Friendship, the excruciating, horror-tinted cringe comedy Robinson released last summer with Paul Rudd (which, as it happens, would make a great Halloween watch). In it, a Robinson archetype befriends his motorcycle-riding neighbour only to ruin it because his nerves at a group hang cause him to act like a maniac. When Rudd's character later tells him he no longer wants to be friends, Robinson is heartbroken. "You made me feel too free!" he says. "You all accepted me way too fast, you can't do that. People need rules!"
Anyway, if The Chair Company manages to win my girlfriend around – and I believe it can, once we get out of the Traitors vortex we've been sucked into – maybe Tim Robinson will finally get the recognition he deserves.
GQ stories you might have missed:
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