“The Chair” is not the satire you think it is

“I feel like I got to the party after the last call,” says Ji-Yoon Kim, the beleaguered Sandra Oh character in Netflix’s gripping new six-episode drama. The chair. She refers to the timing of becoming president of an English department in a fictional “little ivy” when the academy and the humanities are besieged by budget crises. And when, at least in this account, the tenured professors are at the mercy of crowds of empowered and misguided students.

Her frustration is one of the many moments the show draws attention to the phenomenon of women once left out of power given a chance once institutions are already in crisis. And The chair, created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, is an often fun look at what happens when an Asian-American professor gains access to the strangely helpless authority of the department head. Basically, little change.

The series is an excellent comedy-drama about Sandra Oh’s vehicles and workplace, as she is alternately annoyed and drawn to her colleague Bill Dobbs (Jay Duplass), an hapless white novelist who becomes the subject of a backlash on campus. The show chronicles the unfolding of Bill’s scandal and the fortune of the department, in zip-up, bite-sized episodes with great auxiliary characters.

The rich and brief style of the show is one that more streaming shows could benefit from emulation. But his attempt to engage with contemporary cultural mores, already having the show hailed as a biting new satire, is paradoxically the least interesting common thread. While seemingly nuanced about the so-called cancellation culture, the series is less of a racket of power and more of an exercise in sympathy for those already at the top.

Amid the easy pop culture celebrations of ‘girlbossing’ and white women’s empowerment, The chair is kind of a change of pace. The impossible demands placed on Ji-Yoon – and the show’s portrayal of the ineffectiveness of attempting to change systems – is a promising premise.

Ji-Yoon tries to keep his department together, even as the administration has asked him to get rid of old-school white English students whose enrollment is declining. At the same time, she helps Yaz McKay (Nana Mensah), her black colleague, pass her tenure exam despite the preponderance of white men in her department.

The chairS clever writing underscores how the demands Ji-Yoon has to fulfill make it difficult to implement any change. Yaz’s rise is hampered both by the dinosaurs in his domain, but also by donor demands for broader cultural engagement. (Which leads to a fun celebrity cameo that I won’t spoil.)

The show is also adept at its easy target-piercing, like the tenured professors’ emphasis clinging to relevance. He pokes fun at the status obsession of a picky old schoolboy when he complains about how his graduation gown has been made oblong (and therefore could be mistaken for a mastery gown). In another scene, an older white feminist professor (Holland Taylor) tries to file a complaint about her pay gap only to find that the budget cut means the Title IX office and the complaints office have been merged into one. .

The plot really takes off, however, when a recently widowed rock star novelist Bill Dobbs, the former chairman of the department Ji-Yoon has feelings for (spoiler alert) goes viral for giving a mocking Hitler salute in a class. on absurdism. The students demand that he resign because he is “Nazi”. And suddenly Ji-Yoon’s duties include guarding Bill during his scandal because he refuses to apologize.

The subplot is apparently a commentary on how women end up having to clean up men’s mess. But the hubbub with Bill – who is the show’s moral center – never really makes sense. The idea that a white novelist would be falsely accused of anti-Semitism is neither overwhelmingly realistic – as the budget crisis is – nor outrageously parodying.

In a scene where Bill tries to engage his critics and explain himself, the students are not clear what they are asking for. In fact, we never see things from the students’ point of view; they are portrayed as completely ignorant or as decontextualized idealists rightly protesting against funding for ethnic studies.

It’s probably too much to ask of a Netflix series to complicate pop culture’s understanding of power in the age of corporate diversity politics. But the series’ main plot driver only makes sense if you think of it almost as a surrender to undo culture critics who think white men are forced to apologize for things they have not done. (This also suggests that the show didn’t really want to go there in terms of describing those who are actually subjected to militarized accusations of anti-Semitism: Palestinian academics criticizing US imperialism.)

It is also frustrating that the show is implicitly asking viewers to sympathize with the issues of the academic 1% at a time when the biggest crisis in academia is mass addition and the most vulnerable people in academia are graduate students.

Bill’s tech assistant Lila (Mallory Low), who is also a kind of mentee for Ji-Yoon, gets caught up in the fray when a student journalist asks her for her opinion and Ji-Yoon asks her not to comment. . Ji-Yoon and Bill overlook Lila’s complicated situation, and we don’t really see it from her point of view.

In a scene where the department hires a PR person to stop the damage, an administrator questions Ji-Yoon’s “professionalism” by telling the TA not to comment given his relationship with Bill. But the scene plays out like, “Would you ask a man that?” »Sympathetic scenario of empowerment of women. Finally, Lila smiled when she saw Bill’s note in support of her thesis. The authors would have done well to talk to current graduate students to gauge their real feelings about the politics of university work. (Hint: It doesn’t matter who’s in charge, all of them are exploited.)

It’s not like the series can’t lean more outrageously into the humor and power games involved in what’s happening at the top. The way the white feminist professor finds himself raised in the midst of a coup suggests that writers understand the Survivor-style jockey which can characterize multicultural universities. The show juggles enough that a second season can maybe develop some things that are being sidelined here; not only TA’s point of view, but Ji-Yoon and Yaz’s different investments in the possibilities of institutions could be further highlighted.

The chair is a fun-filled comedy-drama about the workplace. But let it be hailed because the satire says more about the media’s overlapping class politics and tenured professors as workers in the cultural industry than its “biting” politics.