RECAP: ‘The Chair Company’ Episode 2 – “New blood. There’s 5 Rons now.”

The first episode of The Chair Company is one of HBO‘s strongest comedy premieres ever. The Chair Company Episode 2, entitled “New blood. There’s 5 Rons now,” is an equally formidable episode. Written by creator/star Tim Robinson and co-creator Zach Kanin (I Think You Should Leave), “New blood. There’s 5 Rons now.” keeps the oddball comedy going on while also taking audiences down the rabbit hole as the proceedings don’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Without further ado, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. 

The Chair Company Episode 2 starts with Ron (Tim Robinson) taking a jog, trying to shake off the feeling of being assaulted and warned against investigating the chair company. He gets a panicked call from his wife, Barb (Lake Bell), telling him to come home immediately.

When he gets there, he’s relieved to find not danger, but his daughter Natalie (Sophia Lillis) asking for their help, convincing her fiancée’s parents to move their wedding to a “haunted barn”. This is a funny little idiosyncrasy to add to the pile, as Ron agrees to talk to the parents. 

Ron goes into work, where he’s supposed to be prepping for a big TV interview. Instead, he’s researching where the shirt he ripped off his assailant at the end of the last episode came from. He pinpoints the location to a specific shopping outlet, planning to take a detour on the way to the interview.

The Chair Company Episode 2 starts with an undercurrent of tension that never lets up.

Only, his boss Brenda (Zuleyma Guevara), worried about Ron’s erratic behavior, makes him take his assistant Jamie (Glo Tavarez) with him. A hilariously petulant Ron accepts being saddled with essentially someone there to keep tabs on him, yet he has a plan in mind, making Jamie take her own separate car.

When Ron gets on the highway, The Chair Company Episode 2 makes use of Friendship director Andrew DeYoung‘s visceral eye. Ron does everything in his power to lose Jamie, weaving in and out of traffic in a way that seems more fit for an action movie. Eventually, he beats a yellow light, only for Jamie to be cut off by an army truck.

The situation is a little more intense than that, as when Ron looks back, Jamie is gutturally screaming and crying in her car, clearly traumatized. Ron can only cringe and drive on. This is the hilariously uncomfortable moment that The Chair Company excels at, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg this episode.

The Chair Company Episode 2 takes a turn for the surreal when Ron brings his assailant’s shirt to the store where it was bought. The store’s cashier is a frankly odd character, talking in a Christopher Walken-style affect and examining the shirt in hyper-specific detail.

The balance of normalcy Ron clings to only emphasizes the weirdness in his life.

He tells Ron that the man who owned this shirt is part of a special “members’ club” and convinces Ron to purchase a membership, only to reveal that he has no idea who the guy is and was just trying to sell a membership. This scene is a perfect example of Robinson and Kanin’s propensity for a set-up and then a punchline that completely subverts expectations. 

Ron arrives at the TV interview, where Jamie is screaming and crying throughout in the background, claiming that Ron evaded her on purpose. After the interview ostensibly goes well, Ron returns home, where he’s being absolutely bombarded by promotional emails from the store he was just asked. One has to love how The Chair Company Episode 2 is starting to build out running gags, as texts and emails from the store continue to blow up Ron’s phone the rest of the episode.

More serious matters are afoot when Ron receives an email from HR that he has to go in to talk about seeing up a co-worker’s skirt after his chair broke. The meeting is mostly a formality until Ron goes on a tangent about how he and this woman were in different “crews” in high school, which makes him look incredibly guilty.

Scenes like these make me want to crawl out of my skin, and it’s delicious. Ron leaves the office after being forced to watch a strange anti-harassment video, where he finds a discarded box of food and a can of soda that seemingly belonged to his assailant. 

The comedy hits on all cylinders, yet never detracts from the serious.

Using the to-go box, he tracks down the restaurant. Here, The Chair Company Episode 2 pummels its viewers, as the restaurant is loud, obnoxious, and prone to breaking into a massive fight, which it eventually does, leading to Ron getting seemingly no answers.

That is, until security arrives, revealing himself to be none other than the man who attacked him in the parking lot (Joseph Tudisco). After a scuffle involving thrown boxes, a fake heart attack, and tons of yelling, the man reveals that his name is Mike Santini and that he was simply hired by a third party to rough up Ron. 

Santini agrees to help Ron find the man who hired him so Ron can dig deeper. He gives Ron a ride home, listening to an extremely crude radio program that’s nothing more than curse words and screaming, before giving him a burner phone that he’ll use to get in contact with him. The radio show is another funny gag that would deserve a deep dive on its own if it weren’t for the other countless top-shelf jokes on display in The Chair Company Episode 2.

Ron goes back to the office the next day, where Jamie reveals to Ron that she’s joined a new church in the wake of her traumatic non-accident. As she asks Ron to join, Ron gets a call from Mike that it’s time to find the guy who hired him. In the parking lot, however, Mike hands Ron a gun, telling him this is a chance to finish off the guy who hired him. Ron, confused and terrified, refuses. Ron goes back home, where his daughter’s fiancé’s father is over. After a heartfelt speech, the father agrees to have the wedding at the haunted barn. 

The deeper we go into The Chair Company Episode 2, the more tangled the web gets.

Just as Ron seems to have moved on, he receives a text from an unknown number. That text says, simply, “No way out,” accompanied by a picture of Ron in his exact position. Ron realizes there must be someone in the closet, approaching it as the dread builds. Cut to black. I haven’t been this on edge since True Detective season one!

The Chair Company Episode 2 is another spectacular half-hour of dark comic television. The tangled web Ron is in is taking shape, the supporting characters are delightfully off-putting, and Tim Robinson & Zach Kanin have an expert control over their unhinged, weirdo sensibility. Each moment of this show feels like a gift to the Tim Robinson faithful, and I can’t imagine that it goes downhill from here. If the first episode was perfect, this one is neck-and-neck with it. 

A couple of observations in The Chair Company Episode 2  I didn’t get into in the recap proper: during Ron’s visit to the abandoned Tecca office last week, he saw a giant inflatable red ball. In this episode, the shopkeeper at the shirt store demonstrates the stretched nature of the shirt by using a red ball. Does the store and its “members’ club” actually have more to do with the conspiracy than we thought? Coincidentally, does Mike’s propensity for profane radio shows have anything to do with the dirty material in the same abandoned office?

I choose to believe this is not a coincidence, and the fact that The Chair Company Episode 2 is making me think this hard about where the story’s headed means that something really special is happening here. It would be shocking at this point if next week didn’t get the same perfect score as this week and last week’s episode. 

The Chair Company Episodes 1-2 are now streaming on HBO Max. New episodes air every Sunday.

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