The Chair, The Chair, The Chair

It’s a little embarrassing how desperately we academics have publicly displayed our eagerness for the new Netflix series The Chair, starring Sandra Oh as a professor and chair of an Ivy League–ish English department at the fictitious Pembroke University. The earliest trailers even spawned memes where scholars scrutinized the faculty offices on the show. Actual professors focused on the abundance of modernist art and wood paneling that rarely adorn faculty offices—if we’re even lucky enough to have them—in real life.

Shortly after that promotion (which I wasn’t aware would be quite so historic while I was immersed in “trusting the process,” as Bachelor Nation might say), I was also asked to chair the department of gender and sexuality studies. Advertisement Advertisement The thirst for shows that accurately represent academia, or that bother to represent academia at all, is understandable given how spectacularly television and film have failed to get even the major details of our profession right, let alone the more nuanced aspects of its racial and gender politics as they unfold through interpersonal intrigue. Shows about academia, and humanities professors in particular, tend to fail miserably because most of our drama unfurls as minutiae, as invisible labor that exacts its toll psychologically, in isolation, and behind the scenes.

Even the largest grants and most prestigious prizes earned by professors usually don’t amount to much in the grander scheme of America’s capitalist sensorium, so cultural capital (and its very niche stakes) remains king. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Sign up for the Slate Culture Newsletter The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox. Please enable javascript to use form.

The absurdism beneath academia’s shabby-genteel displays of self-importance and intellectual grandiosity amid small, yet nevertheless life-altering, stakes is what The Chair’s co-creators, Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, who received her Ph.D. in English from Harvard, truly get right. * The series sheds the earnestness and drama of so many previous small screen efforts at depicting the professoriate and strikes a screwball comedic tone befitting the actual zaniness of its subject. Pratfalls abound in the opening episode, even as we are serviced by the buttoned-up B-roll of collegiate life: a Northeastern campus blanketed by snow, a leather-bound edition of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, stained glass windows depicting scenes of medieval piety and anguish, and massive oil portraits of old white men whose names adorn all the buildings. Her slightly anxious, somewhat idealistic persona is in keeping with what we might expect from a frazzled, overworked college professor.

(The heavy-handedness of the metaphor is lightened by Oh’s expertly truncated, “What the fu—?”) Advertisement In its finest moments, The Chair is a workplace farce doled out in tidy 30-minute increments. We’re given the sense that she won’t be able to heal the institution or bring her department into the new millennium, no matter how many conciliatory Harold Bloom quotes she drops in department meetings.

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Despite being Ji-Yoon’s greatest champion, and supposedly one of the reasons she has ascended to the chairship in the first place (as he constantly reminds her), Bill also does the most to derail her reformist agenda. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Nevertheless, I’m heartened by the fact that The Chair manages to sidestep some of the other clichés of shows focused on academia, especially in the complicated interpersonal relationship between Ji-Yoon and Bill.

Who Stars As Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim In The Netflix Dramedy The Chair?

Sandra Oh and Holland Taylor in ‘The Chair’ on Netflix. When the new Netflix dramedy The Chair premiered on August 20 it was an immediate conversation starter with subject matter that includes sexism, racism and ageism. Sandra Oh stars as Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim, a woman navigating her new role as the Chair of the English department at the prestigious Pembroke University in New England.

Topics also include the struggles of single parenthood, the heartache of caretaking for an elderly parent, the death of a spouse, the loneliness and isolation of an empty nest, what it’s like to be stuck between two cultures, and the swift and dire impact of a cancel culture just waiting to pounce with the oh-so-convenient smart phone at the ready to record a mistake and take down an entire career in the span of minutes. The genius of the six-episode series is that it tackles all of this with a sharp-edged, smartly-written and superbly acted humor. Jay Duplass in ‘The Chair’ on Netflix.

This is Amanda Peet’s debut as a TV series writer and showrunner, though this isn’t her first time writing. Peet previously penned two plays: “The Commons of Pensacola” in 2013 and “Our Very Own Carlin McCullough” in 2018. Nana Mensah in ‘The Chair’ on Netflix.

Oftentimes, a series is excellent but it’s fair to say there’s an actor that didn’t nail a role or perhaps a scene that could’ve been cut. Longino directed all six episodes.