The Chair Company
I said to my dog, ‘How do you like my hippie shirt?
Season 1
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Sarah Shatz/HBO
This week, HBO announced that The Chair Company had been renewed for a second season. From a business standpoint, it makes sense: The show is “HBO’s top freshman comedy in platform history,” after all. But … does this really make sense for the story being told across these initial eight episodes?
Look, I’m a big fan of Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s work, and this is some of their strongest work to date. But of all shows, does The Chair Company actually lend itself to an ongoing serialized narrative? I’ve been watching this story unfold as a miniseries, which makes anything feel possible, even dark, out-there scenarios. Thinking of this as just chapter one of a longer arc threatens to cheapen it a little in retrospect, especially if the finale is conclusive and satisfying. What exactly would season two entail — more scenes hanging out with the Trospers? A new conspiracy with a different angle on Ron’s ego and delusion? More depth for Ron’s family and coworkers? This doesn’t feel like that kind of show.
I tried not to think about the news while watching “I Said to My Dog, ‘How Do You Like My Hippie Shirt?’” (what a mouthful), a very strong penultimate episode that answers more questions than I expected in the lead-up to next week’s finale. It also vindicates Ron in many ways, reframing our understanding of the story we’ve been watching up to this point. Yes, we always knew this was a possibility — I ended my last recap by speculating that Ron could be right about the conspiracy — but nobody could guess exactly how it would all tie together.
Even early in the episode, Ron is feeling good, though we have little reason to believe his hopefulness is justified. After all, the guy just got “a little suspended” from work (possibly fired) for pushing his boss, then brought a dog home without talking to Barb. She’s right to be furious and to point out how much she has carried this family recently.
Left without his usual Fisher Robay obligations, Ron is free to devote most of his time to investigating. That means checking out the other government buildings where the mysterious Eastern European bugs showed up. In a particularly desperate move, he stops by a porn store just to ask the owner about the old photos he found printed at the abandoned Tecca office. There’s no connection there, really, but he thinks it’s possible the guy could somehow connect those photos to corporate fraud. In the end, though, he’s only interested in stealing the photos off Ron’s phone — and Ron has to replace it after it ends up in a running soap stream. Life is very hard and very weird for Ron Trosper.
He does have some solid leads here, though, including the Tecca chairs being loaded into trucks at one of the Delaware government buildings. And an innocuous text from his muted Tamblay member group chat makes something click in his brain. Much like the store adding long sleeves and brown diamond patches to a returned short-sleeved shirt and charging double, Tecca is swapping and reselling parts.
Ron opens up about this to Natalie, who is unusually involved in the investigation these days — I wonder if she’s getting a little carried away, too, based on her scheme to get in contact with Delaware city hall purchasing director Teresa Bonaventura. (It involves pretending she was delivering a ham. In one of the episode’s best asides, Natalie explains that Wendy’s is opening a new, nicer offshoot called Carvers with ham on the menu.) She happily passes along Teresa’s address to Ron, who enters Teresa’s home without knocking.
Meeting Teresa clarifies the situation for Ron: She’s old and sick and not totally there mentally, meaning someone in the Delaware city government is using her as a puppet to fake oversight. The likely culprit: Mayor Greg Braccon, who has already had multiple minor scandals. Mike agrees to help Ron out and tail Braccon at a pub crawl that evening, while Ron is putting in some husband work at a dinner party to get out of the doghouse with Barb.
But Braccon isn’t behind all this, as far as we know. Everything really comes to light where you wouldn’t expect it: at the party for Barb’s investor, Alice Quintana, who happens to be the assistant purchasing director. (It’s amateur work that Ron didn’t know this already, but he can’t see the forest for the trees.) Several pieces fall into place at once here: Ron happens to spot a photo of Alice with Teresa, then immediately gets a call from Oliver Probblo to follow up on the identity of the mysterious woman who photographed the models for Red Ball Market Global. It turns out her name isn’t Maggie S. That was someone else whose sunglasses Oliver stole. The real photographer was named … yep, Alice Quintana.
The reveals don’t stop there, because this is when a familiar face shows up to unsuccessfully cram a pill in Ron’s mouth. It’s the guy who bolted away from him at the “life of the party” class, and it turns out he’s Alice’s nephew, in addition to being the designer of both the RBMG and the Delaware city website. He’d reported to Aunt Alice that Ron was getting close after their run-in.
Does all this rely on serendipity? For sure, and that’s part of the point. Oliver’s phone call in particular is ridiculously timed, calculated for maximum shock value. But The Chair Company has always been surreal, so I don’t mind that type of contrivance. And it’s not like Ron is right about everything. That would just be unrealistic, and a pretty surface-level joke twist. This is ultimately a somewhat small-scale story of local corruption. Teresa wasn’t getting poisoned; she was already sick, and Alice took advantage. And now that she has invested embezzled money in Barb’s business, Ron is faced with a serious moral conundrum. Can he really sabotage his wife by exposing this conspiracy in the name of justice after Barb had his back throughout his Jeep tours flop era?
No, he cannot. Because, in a final brain-bender before he plans to make a move, Ron learns that Barb already knows about the conspiracy he’s looking into. In fact, she’s sharing it with her therapist, who claims she was gushing about how much of a “superhero” Ron is. It’s hard to read this revelation: It makes sense that Natalie would tell her mom about Ron’s latest obsession, but did Barb okay George revealing this information to help gently guide Ron out of this tailspin? Does Barb know exactly what Alice is tied up in? Barb knowingly taking money from an embezzler would reshape our understanding of her as a character.
I’m sure there’s more to reveal in the finale; we know the basics now, but not the full contours of this conspiracy and just how much has been stolen from Ohio taxpayers, or how international this really goes. But I appreciate how much this penultimate episode clears up some of the show’s biggest mysteries, revealing its central protagonist (antihero?) to be a flawed, obsessive man, but also sometimes observant, intelligent, and ultimately good. After all, he chooses to keep quiet so Barb will be happy. As she says, his heart is in the right place.
And with that, The Chair Company finally goes full character study, shifting the finale’s stakes from mystery-centered (“Is any of the conspiracy real?”) to character-centered (“How will Ron cope with the secret knowledge of a conspiracy, and how far will he go to protect his family?”). I’m still skeptical of this becoming a multi-season story, but an episode like this makes me think following these people longer might not be such a bad thing.
• “He grabbed my shoulder, and my hand pushed him. He was being mean to everybody, especially the women, and some of the weaker men.”
• The exterminator’s friend says the bugs are attracted to hot areas like “a phone that has too many tabs open” (a funny line on its own), so that explains the bug crawling into his charging port four episodes back. I appreciate the show’s dedication to tying up every loose end.
• Were those kids all yelling “stone” while throwing, well, stones at Ron? And is that kid’s nose okay?
• Some guy at the dinner party keeps sneaking “pepper patty balls” because he doesn’t like the meal.
• Mayor Braccon’s friend really, really wants to use his hot tub.
• The website designer explains that each of the colors in his tattoo (and the design) represents a woman he slept with. Okay.
• The shot of Ron watching himself cry in the mirror over the credits is a pretty perfect ending.
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