For those disappointed by the humorless and deeply earnest treatment of the contemporary campus experience in the 2020 TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, the new Netflix series The Chair will be a welcome tonic. Over its punchy six half-hour episodes, the show, co-created by the actress Amanda Peet and produced by her husband David Benioff, deals with the iniquities of contemporary university life.
Its setting is Pembroke, a fictitious minor Ivy League campus somewhere in New England. The action is mainly seen from the perspective of the English department chair Ji-Yoon Kim, a Korean-American academic who fears that her promotion has been brought about through ‘diversity issues’, rather than merit. Yet whatever she goes through is not as grim as the fate of her friend, the brilliant academic and author Bill Dobson, who finds himself the target of outrage and protests after a poorly timed mock-Nazi salute during a lecture goes viral.
A conservatively inclined friend told me about The Chair, and said, wryly, ‘it’s surprisingly balanced.’
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