Sandra Oh is a comic delight in campus comedy-drama

The Chair
★★★★
Netflix

The first series from the Game of Thrones producers’ $200 million multi-film and television deal with Netflix is not something many would expect: a comedy-drama set in the world of academia.

The Chair, created by actor Amanda Peet (Dirty John), stars Sandra Oh as Dr Ji-Yoon Kim, a literature professor at the fictional Pembroke University, who has been promoted to the chair of the ailing English department. Full of good intentions as the first woman of colour in the position, Ji-Yoon is immediately told by the college dean, Paul Larson (The Good Lord Bird’s David Morse) that she needs to downsize the department; enrolments are down and few of the crusty ageing, white professors have just a handful of students in their classes, having not changed their teaching methods in decades.

Sandro Oh, Nana Mensah and Holland Taylor in The Chair.Credit:Netflix

Recently employed professor Yaz McKay (Bonding’s Nana Mensah), an African American woman who encourages her students to use theatre and hip-hop in their study of Moby Dick, on the other hand, has over-subscribed classes. Which should make Ji-Yoon’s decision easy â€" particularly as Pembroke’s students are already beginning to call out the institution’s outdated status quo â€" but she’s up against decades of entrenched sexism and racism, and higher education bureaucracy.

Then there’s her complicated relationship with popular English professor Bill Dobson (actor and producer Jay Duplass), a published author and slightly damaged, (he’s still grieving the death of his wife a year earlier) and her fraught home life, centred around her relationship with Ju Ju (Everly Carganilla), the precocious seven-year-old daughter Ji-Yoon adopted as a baby; Ju Ju is of Mexican descent, and less than thrilled at having to learn Korean at home.

Jay Duplass and Sandra Oh in The Chair.Credit:Netflix

It might not sound overly amusing, but Oh’s performance as the flustered Ji-Yoon, is terrific â€" and she has the best caustic one-liners. Although Holland Taylor (Mr Mercedes) as Professor Joan Hambling, an ageing witty Chaucer scholar, who has endured Pembroke’s entrenched sexism for 32 years, comes a close second. (Joan has a fabulous, wacky subplot in which she tries to seek revenge on a student who continues to defame her on a “rate your professor” website.)

There’s a lot going on and things move briskly in the six half-hour-episodes; by the mid-way point, everything has rapidly gone downhill, for the college itself, Ji-Yoon and particularly for Bill, who is filmed during one of his classes (titled Death and Modernism), enacting a Nazi salute.

It’s a tasteless joke but once uploaded to social media, the video goes viral and Bill is soon labelled a Nazi. Campus protests begin, and, begrudgingly, he agrees to apologise to his students â€" but it’s not the kind of apology they want.

At this point, The Chair could have become an easy satire of “cancel culture”, but both the students and the faculty are given some nuance; neither party is made to be entirely at blame, and any conclusion drawn suggests that real change will not stem from one viral video or campus protest.

While there’s a lot of focus on Bill and Ji-Yoon and their potential romance (which some might find detracts from the bigger social issues, particularly given Bill is such a white man cliche), The Chair handles its exploration of topical discussions around sexism, racism and privilege deftly, without losing its dry comic edge. And Oh is a comic delight as the ambitious but neurotic Ji-Yoon.

A highlight is her scene with David Duchovny, playing himself, who the dean’s wife meets at a local farmers’ market and talks the dean into hiring, based on his Beckett dissertation from the 1980s. It’s worth watching for Duchovny, as a slightly desperate wannabe academic, alone.

Kylie Northover is Spectrum Deputy Editor at The Age

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