What ‘The Chair Company’ Has in Common with — of All Things — ‘Prisoners’

At the end of the first episode of “The Chair Company,” Ron Trosper (Tim Robinson) feels like he’s in a different world from the one he began his week in. It looks like a different world, too. 

In the wake of a moment so undoing that, even eight months after the HBO show’s release, I still won’t spoil it, Ron begins diving down an internet rabbit hole into the Tecca Chair Company. A little distraction from his work and home life, some light breaking and entering, and suddenly the walk from his office to his car in the parking lot is lit like a moody Denis Villeneuve conspiracy thriller. The shadows in which he dares to dread get hard and dark, like “Klute.” 

When a mysterious man in a Hawaiian shirt (Joseph Tudisco) comes up behind Ron brandishing a pipe, the show’s right to take its mood so seriously — even about something as potentially trivial as chairs, and even about a protagonist as potentially trivial as Ron. There’s a really fun (and funny!) visual balance between character comedy and visual seriousness that does yeoman’s work setting the HBO series’s tone. 

The yeomen in question are cinematographer Ashley Connor and her camera team, and directors Aaron Schimberg and Andrew DeYoung, who also worked with Robinson on DeYoung’s film “Friendship.” The visual style of “The Chair Company” is what happens when talented filmmakers take serious thriller references and get inventive with them inside of a fairly low-budget comedy series. 

“We don’t have a ton to work with, so we’re constantly trying to be as creative as possible,” DeYoung told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “ Every scene we do in the whole show, we’re not shooting it like a comedy. We want to make sure it’s always as grounded and, and we wanna make it feel like a [Denis] Villeneuve [film], like ‘Prisoners’ as much as possible, so we approached it like that: [If we]  make it feel serious, and then hopefully with what happens, you just are naturally laughing and kinda dumbfounded, and excited to keep watching.” 

For instance, in the parking lot sequence at the end of the pilot, DeYoung and Connor had to meticulously block each beat of the action — Ron realizing he has a tail, running, Mike’s threat, the pipe reveal, Ron going to the ground, chasing after Mike, Mike unbuttoning his Hawaiian shirt, Ron grabbing for Mike and just coming away with the shirt, Mike getting away, and Ron’s befuddlement at the encounter. 

DeYoung and Connor needed to balance the existing light fixtures with how their lights and the camera’s placement/movement would sculpt the space. They use negative fill and unpleasant, seedy light to wrap an absurd kind of dread around both Ron and Mike, but they only had four hours to do it. 

DeYoung, in addition to writing and directing, has a background in editing, so he has the callouses of trying to cut with “crap footage” to help inform the choices that he made. But he and Connor were able to balance covering all the information they needed for each scene and finding moments where, visually, they could just go for broke. 

“We really have to be like, ‘OK, how can we push this as far as possible visually so it’s not just a data scene?,’” DeYoung said. “‘OK, this is a weird angle’ or ‘Let’s shoot it from here.’ We’re trying to be as spontaneous as possible.” 

‘The Chair Company‘ Courtesy of Sarah Shatz / HBO

There’s another sequence where Ron finds himself trapped in one of those gleaming metal-and-glass mall elevators with Amanda (Amelia Campbell), who has contacted HR about him, accidentally, looking up her skirt. All that’s meant to happen is the two share an awkward moment, and Ron writhes internally, but the camera finds a way to echo Ron, tilting upward into the ceiling reflection of the two and creating the visual equivalent of being so embarrassed it feels like your brain is collapsing. 

“On the day we’re shooting that, I think Ashley [went], ‘Look at the mirror on the ceiling,’ and it creates this bizarre hypnotic effect. It’s very playful. That’s my favorite way to work. That’s why I love her so much, because it’s ‘Look at this fun thing. Hit record. Let’s do it,’” DeYoung said. “It feels alive. It’s thematically correct. [Ron is] in this bizarro double world. So a lot of those weird shots are found on the day through us being like, ‘OK, how do we make it not look like anything else or any other TV?’” 

The philosophy to make something that doesn’t look like anything else on TV is to say, “Oh, this image looks fucked up. Let’s shoot that,” according to DeYoung. Throughout “The Chair Company,” DeYoung, Connor, and Schimberg all get to play with imperfect, sometimes bizarre reflections and enough Venetian blinds to buy a Maltese Falcon in Ron’s office building.

But the joy of “The Chair Company” is that the show finds ways to make everything look fucked up, from office spaces to suburban homes and streets to the strange places that Ron’s quest for just one customer service representative takes him. 

Tim Robinson in ‘The Chair Company’Courtesy of Sarah Shatz / HBO

It’s the kind of inventive visual language that only develops when there’s trust between the directors and the showrunners, Robinson and Zach Kanin. “Tim cares like nobody else. I’ve worked with a good amount of creators and comedians, and he has this bar that’s so high up. So I knew going into it that I needed to meet him there, and I know how he likes to work, and he’s not much of an improviser,” DeYoung said. “So we had a good shorthand for sure.” 

With that kind of trust and shared language, DeYoung did feel free to take a more punk approach and pitch the odd, unintuitive compositions and movement that helps the audience start to see Ron’s perspective — more and more, as the show goes on. “ Tim and Zach are so trusting of me and Ashley, and they’re just kinda like, ‘Go for it.’” 

“The Chair Company” is now streaming on HBO Max.