Review: Sandra Oh in "The Chair"
Monday, August 30, 2021 at 5:30PM by Lynn Lee
In my younger days, I wanted to be an English professor. I was pretty serious about it, too – serious enough to major in English, get a fellowship, and enroll in a Ph.D program. Ultimately, I realized academia wasn’t for me and left with just a master’s. I’ve never regretted that decision. Yet I still wonder occasionally what my life would have been like if I’d stuck with my original dream.
So it’s no wonder I immediately let myself sink into The Chair, a new Netflix (mini?)series starring Sandra Oh as the titular chair of the English department at Pembroke University. That's a fictional Ivy League school in what looks like a permanently snow-covered New England college town, although the show was actually shot in Pennsylvania. Basically, it’s my alternate-universe existence if I were as cool and charismatic as Sandra Oh and as brilliant and committed as her character, Ji-Yoon Kim...
The newly appointed Ji-Yoon, as it turns out, is the first woman of color to serve as chair. Initially, she sees this as an opportunity to modernize her very traditionalist, very white department. It doesn’t take her long, however, to realize the position is more of a trap.
Right from the start, Ji-Yoon finds herself under pressure from the dean (David Morse) to find three faculty members to cut in response to her department’s declining enrollments. Meanwhile, she works overtime to ease tensions between Yaz (Nana Mensah), a rising star and popular black junior professor she supports and desperately wants to tenure, and the much older Elliot (Bob Balaban), a giant in Yaz’s field who’s become something of an artifact. Adding to the new chair’s headaches are the stumbles of another colleague, Bill (Jay Duplass), who’s a complete mess after the death of his wife but whose romantic sparks with Ji-Yoon complicate her attempts to keep him out of trouble. Oh, and did I mention that Ji-Yoon’s also single mom to a particularly headstrong 7-year-old adopted daughter?
There’s a lot going on here, arguably too much to squeeze into six half-hour episodes, although The Chair manages to cover its wide-ranging territory with impressive efficiency and a light touch. Ostensibly a comedy but more of a dramedy, its humor nearly always has serious thematic underpinnings. These become more overt as the department’s status goes from precarious to FUBAR after Bill performs a mock Nazi salute in one of his lectures, leading to an uproar. The show walks a careful line with this plot, preserving sympathy for Bill while underscoring how little he understands his students’ perspectives. This balancing act isn't entirely successful, given that we spend so much more time with Bill than with any of the students. Still, it’s a welcome attempt at nuance in a debate usually devoid of that quality, even if I found Bill more exasperating than charming. In general, I could have done with less of Bill and Ji-Yoon’s will they/won’t they subplot, notwithstanding their chemistry. I did, however, appreciate the attention the show devotes to the rest of Ji-Yoon’s personal life – not just her daughter but Ji-Yoon’s absolutely lovely elderly father (Ji-Yong Lee) and their local Korean community, of whom we get an entertaining glimpse in episode 5 that left me wanting more.
Still, it’s Ji-Yoon’s struggles at Pembroke that drive the series, both dramatically and comedically. I can’t speak to how realistically The Chair depicts the inner workings of an English department in an elite university, since I haven’t set foot in one in two decades, though I’ll note that one of the show’s creators, Annie Julia Wyman, has an English Ph.D from Harvard. (The other co-creator is Amanda Peet, who also executive produced the show along with Oh, Peet’s husband David Benioff, and Benioff’s Game of Thrones co-creator D.B. Weiss – talk about a random team!) I did find myself wondering where all the adjuncts and TAs were (we meet exactly one grad student over the course of the show) and why anyone would consider being department chair a promotion when from what I know, it’s a position most professors don’t want.
On the other hand, the various faculty members, ranging from ancient relic to aging former superstar to bright up-and-comer and one amusing celebrity cameo, did ring all too recognizably true to me. And while the senior faculty do get hit with a lot of jokes about being, well, old, they’re not reduced to mere caricature. Balaban’s performance as the frostiest and tightest-lipped of the old guard is a marvel of layering, gradually revealing the pathos of a man who senses his time has passed but can’t quite accept what has replaced it. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Holland Taylor is a pure delight as the crusty, cantankerous Chaucer expert and first tenured female professor at Pembroke, who knows she’s getting edged towards the exit but isn’t submitting without a fight.
But when all’s said and done, The Chair rises and falls by Oh – and she’s fantastic. With every flicker of her expression and every shift in her tone, she conveys Ji-Yoon’s good intentions and genuine desire for progress, but also her vulnerabilities, frustrations, and conflicted allegiances between an older generation that, for all its problems, she’s looked up to and that’s helped her get where she is, and a younger generation that both expects and deserves better. As a fellow Gen Xer, I get it. (In an odd way, The Chair reminded me at times of Hacks, not so much because of any similarity in content but because they prompted a similarly Gen-X flavored reaction on my part to the intergenerational friction so continually on display.) However, you don’t need to be in alignment with Ji-Yoon’s perspective to appreciate Oh’s performance. While there’s plenty to enjoy about The Chair, she is what makes it essential viewing.
Bob Balaban, David Morse, Holland Taylor, Jay Duplass, Nana Mensah, Netflix, Sandra Oh, The Chair, streaming
Reader Comments (7)
The Chair holds a well armed arsenal to hunt an easy target, the traditional liberal arts college that purports the idea that intellect is worthy of cultivation. Such institutions are closing their doors with alarming speed in the US today. In just the past five years over 60 campuses, much like Pembroke University, have fallen to an evolving student population who demand employment with financial reward upon graduation in return for their investment of tuition and time.
Here the English department is a microcosm of the state of higher education. Three veteran professors make annual wages of six figures but no longer read student evaluations or feel compelled to adapt their instruction to cutting edge pedagogy. The Chair is content to ridicule the concept of tenure with cheap humor. Two elderly professors are seated in leather furniture in an ornately paneled room. One farts, is woken by the odor, and asks, “Was that you or me?” Knee slappers about adult diapers are not far behind.
Sandra Oh plays Ji-Yoon Kim, an articulate scholar who still values language and ideas in a deeply flawed bastion of archaic principles. The six episodes of The Chair show Kim struggling with administrative challenges, renegade faculty, an increasingly resentful student population, and parenting demands that require more time and attention than her work allows. These concerns multiply upon themselves in surprising ways that elicit chuckles and maintain our interest. In the final episode when we finally are in the classroom and watch Kim teach with great skill and finesse, it is comforting to be reminded how satisfying meaningful education can be.
The Chair is concerned with the impact of the changing nature of education that is shifting from the development of keen minds to a training model for employment. It’s a perspective explored with humor, intelligence and skill. Fans of good television should prioritize time to watch.
I am on the track to a professorship myself. PLEASE WISH ME LUCK!
On the progress of my taking my Master’s as of now in English too and I am both afraid and excited of my future by looking at this series.
Give Oh her OVERDUE Emmy!!!
Holland Taylor was divine as well here.
Had never even heard about this til it popped up when logging into Netflix as “popular today.” Gave it a watch and really liked it, glad it’s an easy-to-digest 6 episodes. I’m two down. Sandra can do no wrong.
I can't believe Oh doesn't have an Emmy. I could have sworn she had a couple for multiple shows. She always shows up, whatever the role.
My mom was a college professor. I tried not to listen to her talk about department politics, but I heard enough to know it was something I never wanted to deal with. I will have to work myself up to watch this.
This show was all the buzz for about four days among my academic friends on Facebook. Some quite liked it but, on the other hand, some thought it was ageist (fair), offered cartoon caricatures of the cancel culture students (fair), made the horrible white, young, male cishet professor who has few problems but can't get a grip more sympathetic than they should have (fair), was racist for not giving the Black character a home life and her own friends and so on (not fair. We didn't see many of the other characters' off campus lives, either). Also up for criticism was the posh offices--even in the Ivy League you don't see offices like that)--the too-diverse for the Ivy League racial make-up of the students, etc., etc., etc. Some of us had to remind them it is basically a sitcom and a pretty darn good one, warts and all.
And some of it *is* painfully true: The old, stodgy professors who won't retire and can barely find their classrooms, let alone use the equipment; the celebrities invited to give "academic" lectures or worse, professorships (ahem, professor Matthew McConaughey, ahem); the under appreciation of the people of color on the faculty who end up getting jobs as far better schools and are able to say "fuck you," more or less, on the way out the door of the mid-level schools that wouldn't give them their due.... True, true, true....
OMG, we are blessed with so much female-centric TV right now. Sandra Oh is fantastic in this. And Holland Taylor! I'm a bigger fan of the other Duplass brother, so Jay's character annoys me.
I work at a large university in New England, and the department shenanigans I've heard about is so on point with what's going on in this show. But I guess, every workplace has elements of this.
Finbar McBride: Ha, that's a better summary of the show's themes than mine.
Fadhil: Good luck!! And yes, Oh and Taylor were my two faves. Definitely hope the Emmys take notice, though this might be too "small" and niche a show for them.
Paranoid Android: The whole series really flows wonderfully. I'm not a binger, but it is definitely bingeable.
Cash: Ha! But see comment just above. It's far more entertaining than the reality, even if a lot of it does ring true. I'd love to know what your mom thinks (or would have thought) of it.
Dan H: Agreed on almost all counts. We do see a little more of Bob Balaban's character's home life than we do of Yaz (the black professor)'s, but otherwise, the only character we really see a lot of outside the university is Oh's and by extension Duplass, mainly because he's so involved in her life off campus as well as on. I didn't hate Duplass' character, even found him somewhat sympathetic at moments (not as much as the show seemed to want us to, though), but I did weary of him and his unconscious privilege.
Pam:
Hear, hear! I'm so interested to hear what other people ensconced in that world think of the show - I've already been canvassing my friends who are in academia and the response has been mixed though on the whole seems to tilt more positive. I think everyone agrees Oh is terrific, though (and Taylor, too).