Sandra Oh’s Masterly Performance of Empathy in “The Chair” (original) (raw)

In the words of Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh), the title character of the Netflix series “The Chair,” the job of the college professor is to offer her students “refuge from the bullshit.” The campus often seems our last bastion of idealism, where the pursuit of knowledge runs free from faddish politics or market imperatives. This makes it an easy place to ridicule. As the series begins, Kim is settling into her new role as the chair of the English department at Pembroke University, a prestigious “lower-tier Ivy.” Kim is the first woman and the first person of color to lead the department, and when we meet her she is sitting behind an imposing desk in her new office—one of the position’s few perks. She lets out the satisfied breath of someone looking forward to bold new work ahead. But she quickly realizes that she has inherited a “ticking time bomb.”

Kim’s cartoonishly out-of-touch colleagues grapple with declining class enrollments and blame the philistinism of kids these days. “You don’t age out” of the professorate, a stalwart of the Old Guard explains. “You accumulate more wisdom.” Naturally, such wisdom is depicted as useless in the face of the departmental copy machine, the swift judgment of RateMyProfessors.com, and the incursion of critical race theory. One of the department’s pillars is Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), an iconoclastic superstar whose courses remain popular despite the fact that he shows up unprepared. On the first day of class, he plugs in his laptop and inadvertently plays an intimate, NSFW video of his late wife.

If all of this sounds like a cranky think piece come to life, then it conveys the farcical tone set by “The Chair,” which was created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, and executive-produced by the “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. (The series is the first offering from Benioff and Weiss’s deal with Netflix, which is reportedly worth two hundred million dollars.) There is still intrigue, but the palace is much smaller. Workplace dramas tend to exaggerate the thrills of the hospital, the police precinct, or the courtroom—settings where the stakes are already clear. The challenge for “The Chair” lies in normalizing aspects of a profession that might seem profoundly unrelatable to viewers: the obsession with status and prestige as opposed to getting rich, or the fact that existential quandaries still bedevil people who have been granted lifetime employment to ponder whatever it is that interests them. The animating dramas are set in motion when the university’s dean (David Morse), who is more banal than sinister, enlists Kim in an effort to cull the faculty. The dean is powerless to fire anyone with tenure, so he encourages Kim to nudge the senior professors toward early retirement, which, compared with the plot drivers of most TV shows, is hardly life-or-death stuff.

But Kim, loath to betray her former mentors, instead tries to help them boost their enrollment numbers. This group is led by Elliot Rentz, a Melville expert played by Bob Balaban, whose trademark cold joylessness translates in the campus setting to a scholarly gravitas. He’s joined by Joan Hambling (Holland Taylor, who is phenomenal), a crass, occasionally slapstick medievalist whose commitment to literature verges on the erotic. One of the darker, more absurdist plotlines involves Pembroke’s faceless bureaucracy relocating Hambling’s office to a spare room in the basement of the gymnasium. She goes to the Title IX office to file a complaint, and is dismayed to find the coördinator adhering to a more contemporary version of feminism, wearing shorts rather than a pants suit. There are other, more familiar, campus controversies: the well-meaning but inept attempts at diversity and inclusion, the improprieties that cloud a tenure case involving a Black colleague. One senior professor has a farting problem. During a lecture on modernism, Dobson ironically gives a Nazi salute, which results in a viral scandal, pitting academic freedom against the campus P.R. goons, who worry about the school’s shrinking endowment. Most of Kim’s time is spent protecting Dobson, her closest friend in the department, who is still grieving his wife’s death. Their friendship is complicated by Kim’s new authority, as well as by the possibility that they might become more than friends.

Kim’s professional accomplishments lend contrast to a precarious personal life. She is brilliant in the classroom yet struggles to connect with her rebellious adopted daughter, Ju Ju. They lean on Kim’s widowed father, who can’t understand why his daughter is so busy, even after this ostensible promotion. He seems concerned that her prioritization of work will ruin her relationships.

In Dobson, we occasionally see the scruffy allure that established him as an illustrious professor—his eyes are always glinting, whether it’s because of his deep love of poetry or, lately, because of pills. Yet he also seems good at deploying that dishevelled brainiac charm to get out of trouble, such that he often comes across as Kim’s other, even more difficult child. Once he’s ensnared in controversy, he’s unwilling to back down, and his attempts to defuse the situation with reason, rigor, and irony only inflame the students more. They are largely one-dimensional, like a synchronized mob, casting about for offense, taking turns speechifying and calling out anyone who disagrees with them.

What makes “The Chair” worth watching is Oh. Much has been written about her slow path to stardom, as she navigated the limitations imposed on Asian performers in American film and television. She has made a career out of reacting to others and playing complementary roles. Without a lane of her own, she mastered the performance of empathy, working off the energies of those around her. Were this real life, these are precisely the qualities that would make her a good chair. In his upcoming book, “How to Chair a Department,” the scholar Kevin Dettmar outlines an uplifting case for how a chair can transform the culture of an institution, as long as she accepts that she is the “designated grown-up.” This perfectly describes Kim, who is adept at the emotional labor of pacifying hot-shot egos, patiently making unloved professors feel useful again. The writers render her with nuance and a full range of feeling, as when she leaves campus and loses all semblance of professional authority, nagged by her father, challenged by a daughter too young to appreciate what she is going through.

Kim is clearly accustomed to accommodating other people’s misunderstandings of who she is and where she stands as a person of Asian descent. At one point, a student warns her that there will be protests if Yaz McKay (Nana Mensah), a beloved young Black professor, is denied tenure. The student reminds Kim of McKay’s vulnerability as a woman of color at a predominantly white institution. “I know,” Kim replies, too exhausted to point out that she experiences this as well.

McKay’s tenure case is absorbing drama, making better use of the campus setting than Dobson’s brush with cancel culture. Her white colleagues pine for a return to Pembroke’s good old days, yet their skills at textual analysis fail them when it comes to recognizing how she quietly seethes. She constantly looks unsettled, as though she is reacting to slight changes in the atmosphere. As McKay’s patience dissolves, her situation draws out some of Kim’s past obstacles. Kim explains that she waited her turn, and encourages McKay to play the game of “institutional power.” But McKay points out that people like Rentz got to rule the profession for decades. Now he lectures to an empty room. “What are they without us at this point?”

As an English professor, I am in the tiny minority of people who approached “The Chair” invested in its verisimilitude. Academia can seem silly from the outside, full of very smart Luddites struggling with dongles. Yet it’s also a place where people from different backgrounds and generations actually have to coexist with—if not learn from—one another. As the series goes on, it seems to understand this. In one surprisingly tender scene, Rentz reckons with an aging body that is failing him. It doesn’t make him sympathetic, but it does affirm that he is human, rather than a caricature.

I don’t know anyone who has gone through the trouble of becoming a professor with the express goal of ending up as a department chair. The role draws on organizational skills that many academics have made a career out of avoiding; it also leeches away time that could be spent researching or teaching. In academia’s twentieth-century heyday, chairs might have felt as if they oversaw a fiefdom, warring with other departments for status and resources. Kim is a bit more like Tony Soprano, coming in at the end of an era, realizing that “the best is over.”

From “The Wire” to “The Office,” the powerlessness of middle management has been one of the great subjects of modern television. “The Chair” thrives in scenes where manners and decorum get stripped away and Kim recognizes the futility of her situation. Her strange profession begins to seem relatable. Her face, usually so attentive and patient, evinces rage and disappointment. One complication of institutional diversity is that diverse faces can now lead institutions that are in free fall. What accrues in the profession isn’t just wisdom but resentment and frustration. For Kim, this isn’t a refuge. It’s bullshit. ♦

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