Summary
The Chair Company deploys a structural gimmick in Episode 4 that doesn’t entirely work, but it’s still loaded with great comedy and character drama.
After what was pretty unmistakably a Halloween special in disguise, imagine my delight when the cold open of The Chair Company Episode 4 suggested we were doing a Christmas special this week instead. Alas, though, it’s just a flashback (I missed the “six years ago” title card at first). But it does feature Tim Robinson and Lake Bell doing a really fine approximation of a drunk couple, so there’s that to help salve the disappointment of not getting a full-length holiday celebration.
In reality, “Bahld Harmon birthplace (disputed)” picks up where we left off, with Ron having been tormented by a masked man on his home security system. It does return to the flashback gimmick, though. It does this quite a lot, to mixed – but ultimately, I think, detrimental – effect. Maybe it’s just me, but I already felt like I had intuited the rough, misguided path Ron and Barb took from quitting their jobs to pursue their personal ambitions all the way to the frazzled, hair-trigger state we find them in now. I found it fun to imagine how Ron ruined his Jeep adventure business. The reality is still funny, but it was better when it was implied.
There isn’t much mystery around Ron, by design. He’s a pent-up middle manager whose primary source of angst and frustration is that his life isn’t as mysterious as he’d like to be, so there’s some value in leaving things to the audience’s imagination. That’s why the Tecca thing bothered him so much in the first place. He’s a man of internal chaos filtered through dull external order. He likes things just so, and if they’re not, the solution must be a phone call or a Google search away. The conspiracy of Tecca – which, it turns out, might be a wide-ranging operation to smuggle opioids into the country – was only maddening to him because it was illogical.
All this is to say that the flashbacks take something away, I feel, even though they work in context, both in terms of being funny and a structural hook to hang the underlying themes on. What we see in the past – Ron’s business collapsing despite his desperate attempts to preserve it, leading to a resentful career pivot back to Fisher Robay in what Natalie later reveals she has always interpreted as Ron “taking a backseat” to Barb – informs what’s going on in the present day, plot-wise. It allows us to understand why he’s now so jubilant to have uncovered what might be a drug enterprise. But it doesn’t tell us anything more about Ron that we didn’t already know from cleverer, less obvious storytelling.
But if the structural gimmick makes The Chair Company Episode 4 a bit less clever, it doesn’t make it any less funny. There are, as usual, a whole slew of deeply amusing lines here, several of them total throwaways that you might easily miss as a joke in real time – something like Ron handing his phone to Natalie and saying, “It’s a little wet, I’ve been squeezing it,” is such a neat encapsulation of his character. And the string of slightly-escalating annoyances – presumably organised by Tecca – that he has to suffer at work are exactly the kind of thing that this show does really well. Ron is at his best screaming down a phone or getting lost in a Google rabbit hole, or having to field completely asinine workplace inquiries.
It’s all about image. Ron imagined himself as a thriving entrepreneur and never became one, even while his wife did, and his life has been spent overcompensating as a totally supportive husband and loyal company executive to disguise a churning sense of impotence at his core. Initially, his Tecca fascination was annoyance at having been embarrassed in front of the people he spends all of his time trying to impress, but now that he’s actually peeling back the layers of an onion that might have drugs inside, it’s morphing into a crusade to prove his own importance, to show his daughter that he’s not taking a backseat to her mother. It’s a little sad, really. Even in the HR investigation into his relationship with Amanda, Ron’s more bothered about whether or not people think he hung out with her in high school than about potentially being reprimanded for sexually harassing her.
It’s all a little sad, really. Ron thinks that Natalie is suddenly proud of his detective work, but the closing flashback of her watching him obsessively, endlessly toil away on his go-nowhere Jeep business, expects us to connect the dots that she thinks he’s spiralling again. I can’t decide whether the worst thing that could happen here would be Ron being right about all this or completely wrong. I guess we’ll find out.
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