I really wanted to like The Chair.
I mean, it’s a dramedy about an Asian woman as the Chair of an English Department at a University. It represents breaking everything, from glass ceiling to ethnic stereotypes and nearly everything under the sun.
But is it?
Maybe I did not understand, but The Chair was not what I was expecting. Maybe I expected too much, because it has so much ground to cover within a measly six episodes. But The Chair feels more like falling off the chair, like the titular character did in the first scene of the first episode. Or was that scene a premonition?
I have loved Sandra Oh for a very long time. From Grey’s Anatomy, to Under the Tuscan Sun, to Killing Eve. She is one of the few Asian actors who managed to merge the Asian cultural subtly with Western acting techniques, and made it her own. Something I am aspired to and trying to achieve as an actor myself. However, The Chair needed more than that to make it memorable as a series, and for me when you felt that things are turning around the corner in the show, it staggered and hobbled, and I felt, well, another missed opportunity.
The premise of The Chair was quite straightforward. An Asian woman worked up her ranks and became the Chair of an English Department, beating out all the White men who have been holding the reins of the Department, because they thought they knew English and what English studies were about. So, I thought it will be able to show how this Asian woman changes perceptions, knocks down barriers and presumptions, and became the even more successful Chair than these colleagues, who thought they supported her and made her where she is could perceived. Or maybe I just had that naïve thought of a happily ever after for an American dramedy.
Turned out that the pace was slow in setting up the characters, and by slow, I just felt that it drags on in a confusing manner. For me when it is a six-episode series, I would expect character set up to be swift clear cut and we knew their motivations right at the start. So, for most of the rest of the series, it would be about their journey and growth, not about trying to keep finding out who and what they are. What was clear to me from the beginning was who Sandra Oh’s Ji-Yoon is. But even that, I felt like she had become a caricature of her representation as a single 46-year-old Korean woman who dedicated her life to her career but being seen as an alien in her own culture (because she turned down a marriage for a career). The only sprinkle on that caricature was that she has a Hispanic adopted daughter. Apart from that, the story telling of her character was just old school and lack of new ideas. From work politics to family politics, every turn of the corner was anger and cliché filled. Sandra could have brought so much more to this character but there were so many times I felt that her character was so constrained by this caricature that she was shoved into. That doesn’t mean that her performance was bad, but this character felt like she is having weights hung around her neck, preventing her to look up properly and naturally.
Jay Duplass’ Bill Dobson for me is a quite unsympathetic character from the audience point of view. We were told of his background in a few words in a conversation, and that trivialised the events that made the audience felt that his actions were completely justifiable. I am not saying his actions are out of character but has the stake been high enough that, that fall from that point contributed to all the actions that came after it? If his relationship with Ji-Yoon is that close, why is he acted like he had not got over with the events before this, when it was supposed to be over a year ago? That kind of conflicting portrayal of this character made it very confusing as an audience member to figure out psychologically what place did this character come from. And all those cliché ‘issues’ that he posed and encountered just really dragged the character down as a credible character for audience to sympathise and relate with.
I am not saying dysfunctional characters will not work. They will, when they were created properly and allowed the time to grow. In a six-episode mini-series the failure on creating credible dysfunctional characters will be a lot more unforgiving, as compared to a full 15 to 28 episode season, especially when each episode is only around 30 minutes long. The only characters that I actually liked during this whole 3-hour series was Nana Mensah’s Yaz and Holland Taylor’s Joan. In the limited time they appeared on screen they shined. Their characters were sharp and a lot more well developed. This is probably because as side characters that are supposed to provide point of difference, they attacked the story plots fiercely and pointedly. That allowed Nana and Holland to flash out these characters to a full extent without the need to hold back, as compared to Sandra’s Ji-Yoon, in case something down the line contradicted to a previous plot point in the story. They are very memorable characters and fun to watch, although I would like to see Yaz more, as it was a good strong character that helped move the plot along.
For me, The Chair seemed to set out to change things but in fact it was too politically correct and incorrect at the same without properly addressing either of them. The one thing that stayed truth to this world, being someone who had work in the higher education sector for so many years in the past, was that school and university management has a lot of time been about politics – it is about image politics, politically correct politics, freedom politics and all kinds of gender and minority group politics. However, this show can be so much more than just politics. With so much politics packed into 30 minutes, everyone seemed to be so angry all the time that at times I wonder whether I was watching a dramedy or a desperate political drama. I think trying to address so many things within such a short space of time ended up addressing nothing at all. People are entitled to their anger, their feelings, their emotions, their views, their opinions but you need a more solid ground to establish that in a show, so they did not end up diminishing their own significance after they commenced their journey.
I am not saying that The Chair is a horrible show. It has its moment. I had moments that I did laugh out loud with the story. But at the same time, for me for a 6-episode series of 30 minutes each episode, I would expect it to pick up faster, not until like, the second half of the fourth episode, that when you just got into it, it is rushing towards the finishing line. I think if given another two episodes to establish itself The Chair could have achieved what it set out to achieve better. Still, the anger of everyone needed to be tone down to a reasonable level as uncoordinated fireworks will just ruin the show.
The Chair is now screening on Netflix.
