This New Show Just Debuted With A 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score And Peak Interest

There’s no doubt that quality rather than quantity is the dream ticket for streaming services. All it takes is a few standout shows or movies for a platform to dominate the discussion regardless of its size. If those productions are low cost it sets the scene for blockbuster profits. One genre consistently delivers precisely that.

Comedies are some of the toughest productions to get right. They are amongst the oldest genres in entertainment so many viewers almost-literally have seen it all before. Likewise, if the humor falls flat they sink without a trace. However, when comedies hit the mark they offer some of the richest rewards due to their relatively low costs. That’s not all.

The higher the barrier is to breaking new ground, the faster word spreads when a side-splitting show or movie pulls it off. HBO knows all about it.

The studio’s latest show, The Chair Company, debuted last night concurrently on HBO and its HBO Max streaming service. The dark office satire is making a splash thanks to its surreal premise.

Split into eight weekly episodes, the comedy is centered on Ron Trosper an affable family man who works for a company which is developing a new mall. After being humiliated by an embarrassing incident with an office chair he launches an amateur investigation of its shadowy manufacturer sending him down a rabbit warren of corporate conspiracy theories.

Riffing on real life, when Trosper looks into the manufacturer he finds that the phone number on its website goes through to a broader furniture company and when he tries to get an email address from its helper bot it redirects him to the pointless contact page.

The mystery of whether the company is actually up to no good, or whether it is paranoia, is compounded by the cast of quirky characters surrounding Trosper. One of his co-workers is convinced that there’s metal in his body while a clothing salesman bizarrely uses a basketball to demonstrate how a belly can put strain on shirt buttons.

Many of the supporting parts are played by little-known actors with the most famous being Young Guns star Lou Diamond Phillips. It’s a different story with the leading roles and this explains why the show is so zany.

Trosper is played by Saturday Night Live veteran Tim Robinson who created The Chair Company with longtime collaborator Zach Kanin with both also serving as its writers and executive producers. The two met as writers on SNL before leaving to create the comedy series Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave which Robinson also starred in.

Their background working on live television explains why The Chair Company has such a surreal and almost improvised air. “None of this is thought out,” Robinson told Vulture when asked what the show is about and how he came up with the concept. “It’s not planned. It’s not on purpose.”

It reflects comments from Diamond Phillips in an interview with the AU Review which said that “Tim and his (writing) partner, Zach Kanin, came from SNL (where) they rewrite constantly. They’re trying new things. I mean, I can do a scene a dozen different ways and I’ll usually leave set knowing how it’s going to be cut. In this, I don’t know.” That seems to be a good thing.

On its debut, the show became a member of an elite group with a 100% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It is largely thanks to its lunacy with TV Guide calling it “the funniest show of the year”. Esquire added that “there is nothing else like The Chair Company on TV today” while Slashfilm succinctly summarized it as “an unhinged dark comedy about a man tumbling further and further into a conspiracy that could all be in his head.”

However, cringe comedy and the kind of surreal scenarios you usually find in a David Lynch film aren’t the only reason it resonates with critics.

In spite of the show’s absurdity, Trosper’s bizarre behaviour reflects the very real obsessions of online life in the misinformation age. “While The Chair Company doesn’t explicitly focus on the internet, it still speaks to the anxieties or inconveniences that arise from being online today,” wrote Mashable. IndieWire added that Trosper’s travail “translates as one we all fight every day: when to log on vs. when to log off.” It hasn’t fallen on deaf ears.

There was just one audience review on the launch of the show so it had no Rotten Tomatoes audience score. However, after less than a day on release it is already attracting tremendous attention. This can clearly be seen in the chart below based on data from Google Trends, which analyzes the popularity of top search queries.

The chart shows that this week the show is set to hit a score of 100 representing the maximum relative interest worldwide rather than the absolute number of searches. Despite only having a single audience review, interest in the show is peaking on release rather than in the run up to it or last month when its first trailer dropped.

If it carries on like this HBO could be on to a good thing and it seems to know it. When Deadline reported that HBO had approved a pilot for the show in April last year it claimed that the network was betting on creator-performers for its next crop of comedies following the end of two of its flagship shows, Barry and Curb Your Enthusiasm. It seems to be paying off.