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It’s a rare show – and, in case it wasn’t obvious, The Chair Company is a very rare show – that doesn’t seem any closer to meaningfully explaining what it’s about by the time it’s halfway through.

The best joke in I Love LA is that the funniest character isn’t any of the Gen Z influencer caricatures that Rachel Sennott has clearly created the show to mock.

I think it’s safe to say that It: Welcome to Derry has been much better than anyone expected it to be.

It is highly probable that I am so far removed from the target demographic of an HBO comedy about single twenty-something Californian girls – and guys! – trying to make it in L.A., that any opinion I may or may not have on the subject is utterly worthless.

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.

You can tell a lot about a show from its title sequence. It: Welcome to Derry boasts a fun one in Episode 2, “The Thing in the Dark”, which fittingly released on Halloween on Max and will occupy its usual timeslot on HBO.

There’s a thing about jump scares where they almost never work because savvy viewers have come to expect them.

There are openings, and then there are openings. It: Welcome to Derry has an italicised version.

All the comedy in The Chair Company lives in the space between how other people see Ron Trosper and what he’s actually like.

Task ended with Robbie’s death, in many ways. I don’t mean literally, obviously, because Episode 7 devotes another epilogue-style hour to tying up loose ends...

The clue is in the name, sometimes. Even if you didn’t know that HBO’s The Chair Company comes from I Think You Should Leave’s Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, the simple fact that it’s called The Chair Company should be a bit of a giveaway that it’s slightly off-kilter as far as comedies go.

People die. This is true in real life and even truer in television shows, since drama needs conflict, and conflict is invariably kicked off and concluded with violence.

In many ways, the ending of Peacemaker Season 2 is exactly the opposite of what audiences have come to expect from the finale of a...

If there’s a better show in 2025 than Task, I’d be interested to see it. You can always rely on HBO to just ride into town and drop extremely high-quality prestige TV on a semi-regular basis, to an extent that it almost feels unfair to other networks and platforms.

It might have taken ages for Peacemaker Season 2 to finally get good, but now that the ball’s rolling, it has quickly generated enough speed to carry right through into the finale.

Watching Task really is an exercise in being put through the wringer. Here are a bunch of people who are mostly well-intentioned but all deeply traumatised, trapped in a situation beyond their control that just keeps escalating.

I’ve been waiting ages for Peacemaker Season 2 to really get going. I thought the process might be incremental, but in Episode 6, it happens all at once.

At this point, I’ve given up on my quaint hope that anyone in Task doesn’t have a deeply traumatic personal backstory. It’s a waste of time.