The Chair Company
@BrownDerbyHistoricVids Little bits of Hollywood? Okayyy.
Season 1
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Sarah Shatz/HBO
“@BrownDerbyHistoricVids Little bit of Hollywood? Okayyy” strikes me as the closest thing we might ever get to an average episode of The Chair Company. That’s not a knock at all, star rating aside; the show is just settling into a more consistent groove, and for me, that means this episode lacks a little of the surprise of the previous weeks.
That says a lot, though, in an episode where a bug crawls into Ron’s phone through its charging port, addressed in one line of dialogue by a weirded-out sales rep and then never mentioned again. There’s a creeping menace underneath everything here, and it makes watching the show a discomfiting experience even when the actual threat of violence isn’t there. In fact, much of this episode plays out as a series of misunderstandings and clarifications, and that might be the dominant mode for this show: introducing something unsettling but then undercutting it one scene (or one episode, or five episodes) later.
Take the opening, which resolves last week’s cliffhanger with the revelation that the man taking photos of Ron in his closet is actually working for Mike Santini. He was supposedly sent here just to keep an eye on Ron and was supposed to send the photo to Mike, but he mixed up the burner numbers. That doesn’t take away from the cliffhanger or the confrontation itself — the episode starts off with an intense chase following LT’s burst from the closet — but it does provide another blueprint for this show’s regular horror subversions.
Of course, it’s not like Ron can forget about what just happened. Each of these scares leaves a lasting imprint on his psyche, and you get the sense that they’re starting to accumulate. At the rate this man is going, he might be a shut-in by the finale. The scene with LT is just the latest nightmare fuel-up, judging by his aggressive broom-stabbing to check the closets in the middle of the night. LT might’ve been a “red herring,” but the scenario leads Ron to imagine the worst, including an intruder who would force him to kill his own family. Those people exist, he points out to Barb, so an expensive security system only makes sense.
As for the actual conspiracy investigation, Ron and Mike make some headway in this episode, traveling several layers deeper down the Tecca rabbit hole. Mike apparently managed to confirm that his employer, Jim X, got paid $50,000 to have Mike scare Ron. (Seems like Mike should be pissed he got a measly fraction of that to do the actual scaring.) So Ron goes to the county clerk’s office (using Douglas’s name) and sees the name RBMG, Inc. on the deed for the abandoned building he visited. Apparently the last man to check out the deed was a mean man named Steven Droyco — intel Ron manages to capture with some not-bad spy work.
A quick Google clarifies that RBMG is short for Red Ball Market Global, a shady company with a photo of that giant red ball from the abandoned office on its website. There are photos and names for board members, including a woman named Ronda whom Mike calls gorgeous, but they go nowhere. And when Ron calls the RBMG phone number, the (amazingly catchy) hold music plays on a nonstop loop. “That’s the problem with the world today,” Ron vents to Mike over beers. “People make garbage, and you can’t talk to anybody.” Theme of the show?
Aside from a drunk, angry message for National Business Solutions mentioning the RBMG board, the rest of Ron’s progress this week relates to Droyco, whom Mike tracks down. The guy seems unstable, freaking out and taking off as soon as they ask about Tecca. But Ron isn’t leaving empty-handed, so he and Mike break in and grab some random papers. In a spooky touch, they also run into an old woman who supposedly died a couple of years ago: Droyco’s mother, who is apparently pretending to be dead because she owes her sister money.
Droyco explains this to Ron during an unannounced visit to Fisher Robay. He’s willing to admit that he worked at Tecca for four days, taking parts off chairs and putting other parts on while in the nude. He recognizes a photo of Ken Tucker, the CFO of Red Ball Global, but doesn’t have any more information to offer. Ron will return his papers to him when he’s ready to chat more. Soon after, though, Ron is getting a security alert with a horror-movie shot of a hooded figure in a hockey mask sitting in a Tecca chair outside the Trosper house, shaking his head manically. “Jason!” Ron exclaims in the final moments, just in case the scene was in danger of falling too far on one side of the horror/comedy divide. I expect the horror to further deflate once we get the context.
Aside from near-misses like the intruder at game night, Ron is still managing not to let his Tecca obsession totally infiltrate his work and family life, although there are signs of discord on both fronts. For one, the choice to keep football out of the Canton mall development gets some pushback and publicity, including from a former Cleveland Browns player who cries on the news about it. Ron wants to stick to his vision, but his boss Jeff and colleague Alon undercut him by coming up with their own nod to football. It’s small, but Ron’s ego is fragile — especially thanks to the pressure to live up to his father’s legacy, a character trait straight out of Detroiters. As Ron explains it to Mike, his dad was a great man with “a bridge named after him.”
Ron’s home life in this episode feels particular Breaking Bad-esque: His wife is suspicious about his whereabouts, and his son is acting out. When he sees Seth drinking outside on the security camera, he arranges a meet-up at a café, where Seth explains, “I found out that if you actually don’t drink too much, drinking is actually really fun.” When he’s drunk, he says, he tells jokes because they’re funny, not just to get a laugh. (He also sometimes drinks beers and watches Abbott and Costello, which really has nothing to do with self-consciousness.) Ron doesn’t even fight Seth’s logic, maybe because he experiences that same desire to just be his core self instead of an idealized, hard-working family-man projection of himself.
But Ron breaks one secret to keep another by using the Seth issue to get out of explaining his own recent extracurricular activities to Barb — in the process totally violating his agreement with Seth, a sign that Ron’s efforts to hide are pushing him to be a worse husband and worse father. His recent absences have Barb wondering if he’s escaping the tedium of Fisher Robay by doing “Jeep tours” again, having seen the box that LT and Mike were kicking around in the garage. In this absurd take on a Breaking Bad-esque antihero drama, Ron’s dark past has nothing to do with drugs or gambling or contract killing. He used to be obsessed with Jeep tours.
Whenever I spend too long writing about the actual character of the drama The Chair Companyor untangling the increasingly convoluted plot, it starts to feel a little silly. This is a series with a distinct vision and tone, yes, but it’s also just a chance for Tim Robinson and Co. to fuck around, and that’s still true in “@BrownDerbyHistoricVids Little bit of Hollywood? Okayyy.” Look at the clerk who gets sent home to take a shower, because apparently people can smell her. Or Douglas’ supremely creepy “mistakes party,” where people wear either yellow or green wristbands depending on their comfort level with mistake-making. In an episode dense with theories and red herrings, those glorious diversions are what linger most.
• “You put a little guy in my closet?”
• Good background line from a sales rep: “Oh, fuck yeah. We’re just popping in for a fuck-around, but it’s always such a pleasure to see you, Ron Trosper.”
• Ron reassures Barb about their expenses by saying they’ll have “a billion bucks” soon. Sure, Ron.
• Mike’s anecdote about his ex-wife poisoning him with a hundred “sexual stamina pills” raises a lot of questions, but at least we know that the pills made him smell like a duck.
• I would think Ron would be concerned about Mike making direct contact with his son, but maybe he knows Seth is too much of an airhead to even question the guy.
• “I didn’t even want the green. He made me take the green and said, ‘What are you going to do? What mistake do you think you’ll do?’”
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