![]() ![]() Figures like Yaz (Nana Mensah), a popular young professor on track to becoming the department’s first tenured Black woman, and Lila (Mallory Low), a teaching fellow whose future is jeopardized by Bill’s screwups, are shunted to the sidelines, often treated more like talking points than fully realized individuals. Even as The Chair takes the students’ complaints in good faith, the students themselves are presented as an undifferentiated mass, and their arguments given to faculty characters to explain. Peet and Wyman turn in some of their sharpest characterization with their portrait of a basically decent guy who’s been too blinkered by privilege for his own good (“Who gives a fuck how you’re seen?” he complains at one point, with the misguided indignation of a man who’s never once had to worry what others might think of him), and Duplass so expertly toes the line between charming and aggravating that even by the end, it’s tough to know exactly how to feel about him.īut far less time and energy is spent fleshing out other characters with an equal stake in the central storyline. The series turns out to be as much Bill’s story as it is Ji-Yoon’s, which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing. Which makes it all the more disappointing that The Chair falls into some of the same traps as the culture it’s trying to critique. There are no simple villains in The Chair, and no easy fixes on the contrary, the series goes out arguing that real change must go beyond the handling of a single person or a single event. The series takes pains to show that the outcry isn’t an overreaction by a few over-sensitive kids, but a flashpoint within larger discussions about inclusivity, sensitivity and social justice. Within the context of the show, it’s clear that Bill’s gesture was a tasteless joke rather than a deliberate display of bigotry, but it’s to The Chair’s credit that it avoids dismissing his critics out of hand. ![]() Perhaps the greatest gift of The Chair is that its holistic view of Ji-Yoon’s life lets Oh play everything from frazzled to righteous to playfully sexy in a succession of smart coats and well-tailored suits plenty of shows have been built on less.īut no character demands more of Ji-Yoon, or of the viewer, than Bill. ![]() But while The Chair gets in a few solid jabs (wait ‘til you hear the list of celebrities the department has tried to honor), the six-episode season proves to be less interested in skewering academia than in adding nuance to the hand-wringing around it.Īgain and again, Ji-Yoon’s best intentions smash up against the contradictory needs of anxious professors, a pragmatic dean (David Morse) and a disgruntled student body - as well as those of her personal life, which includes an adorable but ornery 7-year-old daughter (Everly Carganilla). The premise feels ripped from countless headlines about cancel culture on college campuses, and all the players seem at first to be ripe for parody. Cast: Sandra Oh, Jay Duplass, Holland Taylor, Bob Balaban, Nana Mensah, David Morse, Everly CarganillaĬreated by Amanda Peet and Annie Wyman, the Netflix dramedy paints a picture of a department that’s already in crisis thanks to declining enrollments and a corresponding dwindling budget - and that’s before one of their professors, a formerly beloved trainwreck named Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), attracts national outrage thanks to a viral video of him performing a Hitler salute in class.
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