The Chair: The ‘Everything Just Stops’ Ending

Sometimes you can literally see the moment the writers gave up.

All I see are all those lovely books.

Since we’re living in peak I’ll Watch Anything Higher Than 60% on Rotten Tomatoes times, there’s a new series or limited series or movie or visual tone poem or something to watch just about every week¹. Man, the youth of today will never know what it’s like to have literally six months out of each year devoted to old Duke of Hazzard re-runs². Thanks to overworked publicity flacks, each one of these new series gets a few days of obsessive coverage in various media, giving the impression that the whole world is breathlessly discussing this show over virtual water coolers³.

I’m usually a few weeks to a few years late on these shows, as I nap a lot and spend what precious free time I have writing newsletters (apparently), which means I am typically writing about stuff that everyone else discussed to death months or years ago⁴. Which does not stop me, because I am my own biggest fan and I can’t let myself down⁵. In other words, y’all need to read my thoughts on The Chair, the Netflix series starring Sandra Oh as a stuffy college’s first female, non-white Chair of its English Department.

The Chair is delightful in many ways. I haven’t been on a college campus in decades and I was never a teacher⁶, but it felt pretty truthy about the academic world to me. The characters are fun (most notably, for me, Holland Taylor as an excitable and foul-mouthed septuagenarian professor), and if the whole “kids is woke” narrative felt a little clunky throughout, it tempered that with an acerbic view of the mediocre white men who continue to rail against the fact that the world dared to change without their permission or input⁷.

Overall, a solid show, and who doesn’t love Sandra Oh? Or at least, it’s a solid show for five episodes. The sixth and final episode has the energy of someone falling down a flight of stairs and hurriedly trying to compose their will as they do so, or possibly a hastily-filmed replacement episode after an intern accidentally set the hard drive holding the footage on fire⁸.

A little harsh

<Immortan Joe Voice> MEDIOCRE!

Okay, that’s a little harsh—the final episode is a little ragged, though, and definitely smells like a hurried ending. I have no idea if that’s true, if they had bigger, more carefully layered plans that had to change, perhaps due to a cut in the number of episodes or some other unexpected misfortune. All I know is that the show has a fairly deliberate pace for five episodes and then explodes into a minimally coherent tone poem in the last one.

The first five episodes develop several threads. First, there’s Sandra Oh’s Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim and her struggle to balance being the first woman of color to hold the position of Chair of the English Department at Pembroke University, her challenging relationship with her adopted daughter, and a burgeoning scandal when one of her professors (and her best friend and potential love interest) does something really, really dumb in front of a camera⁹. Then there’s the aforementioned love interest, Bill (Jay Duplass), who is battling depression after his wife’s death and making a series of really, really bad decisions. There’s Holland Taylor’s Joan Hambling, a senior professor realizing her age has made her a target of a cost-cutting school (Taylor’s rage at this is one of the funniest aspects of the series), Nana Mensah as Yaz McKay, a brilliant young teacher trying to secure tenure against the withering scorn of the (much) older generation of white, male professors, and a young student named Dafna who seems to have designs on Professor Bill.

Seriously, Holland Taylor deserves all the awards.

The first five episodes explore these threads carefully, giving them room to breathe. Then, in the final episode, they all get checked off one by one without anything that feels like real resolution. Bill behaves disastrously, but his consequences are weightless! Ji-Yoon stands up for herself and her vision for the department, and neither wins nor loses, really! There’s a last-minute coup in the English Department, and just as quickly as Ji-Yoon loses her position she seems completely fine with it! Dafna’s obsession with Bill is paid off with the storytelling equivalent of a sad trombone noise—a story thread that never grew into enough to have any impact whatsoever¹⁰!

Granted, there are ‘endings’ here. But it’s so awkwardly rushed that nothing lands, nothing matters. People lose jobs and shrug. People take too many pills and ruin a little girl’s birthday party, and everyone just pats them on the back. An entire campus apparently rises up in indignation that turns into a protest—but we never see how it reacts to the firing that results. We’re missing key details about the hows and whys surrounding the resolutions, making it all feel very perfunctory and hurried, as if the writers had a date to meet someone for drinks and just jotted down an outline of how the show needed to end and the producers realized if they were going to cram in the randomly long list of story points in forty or fifty minutes, they’d best get to resolving shit.

Resolution by brute force never works, kids. Characters suddenly stop caring about things, they make decisions that don’t jive with their previous actions, and consequences just melt away, all to get to that final shot of Sandra Oh and Jay Duplass sitting on a bench, laughing. And it doesn’t matter how good the first five episodes were: That’s just bad writing¹¹.

Next week: Doctor Who and the exhausting effect of exposition.

1. I just realized: I am exhausted.

2. Someday we as a civilization will have to go through a reckoning concerning just how awful television in the 1970s and 1980s was. If my parents had cut my TV time by one hour per week I would probably be a billionaire today. That’s how harmfully bad it was.

3. As a minor member of the manipulative Internet hype machine, I can confidently tell you that no one is as excited about anything as it might seem. It’s all trickery.

4. I used to fancy myself a cutting-edge bon vivant of pop culture, but that was back when there were three channels and one radio station worth paying attention to. Wait, why am I turning into dust … never mind.

5. I Am My Own Biggest Fan and I Can’t Let Myself Down is definitely the title of my memoir. Runners up: If You Pour, I’ll Drink, Cats! Cats Everywhere, and I Have Seventeen Cents in My Pocket.

6. And to be honest my memories of my college experience are hazy. There was a lot of Pearl Jam, warm beer, and tie-dye, for some reason.

7. This is definitely a show that can’t make up its mind which is worse: Mediocre white men complaining that they can’t make a joke about Nazis any more, or the kids who film everything and mock you relentlessly on the tubes. My vote? Mediocre white men. Take it from me: We got nothing.

8. Possibly while also falling down the stairs.

9. Which is to say, literally anything. The moment a retail version of an invisibility cloak comes out I will purchse three, because my biggest fear right now is discovering I’m in a Tik Tok called Out of Shape Old Leans Down to Pick Up Nickle and Splits Pants, Runs Off Crying.

10. Though (SPOILERS) the fact that Bill assumes she’s got the hots for him but in reality she just wants him to pass her novel to his agent is fantastic. As is the sight gage of the 2,000-page manuscript she pulls out of her bag, though who in the world has hardcopy these days? Printer ink is expensive, y’all.

11. And if there’s one thing I know about, it’s … oh. <sad trombone>