Television review: The Chair

With hypersensitive snowflake American students on the warpath, surely Netflix six-parter The Chair is a horror series? A cautionary tale to terrify anyone over thirty? Nearly, it’s a comedy drama aka quite amusing drama, with attempted murder of a kind, to someones’s character and academic career. And like the zombies in The Walking Dead, the rampaging hordes serve mostly as background noise for a scared English department to cope with and mollify as they struggle with their own problems.

Heading up the literature professors of fictional sub-Ivy league Pembroke College is always likeable Sandra Oh as Dr Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman and person of colour to be elected as department chair, after the implosion of its former occupant, Bill Dobson played by Transparent’s Jay Douglass. Dr Kim has her hands full, juggling an abundance of costly ageing and seemingly irrelevant faculty staff, declining enrolment, and financial cuts, whilst being a single mother to her troubled adopted child, and supporting her friend and former lover, the doubly grieving Bill, who’s wife has passed away and college bound daughter gone away.

With Sandra Oh also presently starring in not one but two other hit shows, Killing Eve and Invincible, it can’t be a stretch to portray someone that busy, but Ji-Yoon’s permanently flustered state ratchets up a notch after Bill is filmed doing a Sieg Heil that rapidly becomes a meme and sparks protests. That the clip’s taken out of context from one of Bill’s lectures, where he uses it to punctuate a point about the connection between Fascism and Absurdism, is what a cleverer person than I might refer to as dramatic irony, or illustrative, or something or another.