Review: Tim Robinson's 'The Chair Company' on HBO

Among the wisest decisions Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin made when they created Netflix's I Think You Should Leave was to embrace brevity. Every episode is under 20 minutes long, and most of the sketches come in at four minutes or less. The one about the store that sells shirts with complicated patterns? It's only three and a half minutes. The hot dog costume sketch that's become the most useful meme of the last decade? Only three minutes. The one about Coffin Flop doesn't even run two minutes. Every now and then you'll get an epic sketch by ITYSL standards — at over five minutes, the one where Robinson reflects on his days as a piece of shit who ate sloppy steaks with his Dangerous Nights crew is their Godfather Part II — but Robinson, Kanin, and company understand that less is more in their world. It's not just that they don't want the jokes to overstay their welcomes, it seems, but that they understand that their characters really shouldn't overstay their welcomes. The central figure of every ITYSL sketch, whether played by Robinson himself or one of his troupe of comedian pals like Sam Richardson and Patti Harrison, is inevitably a weird person whose specific fixations, and their refusals to read social cues, can generate a few minutes of explosive laughter. But almost all of them would become off-putting if asked to stick around for too long. (Even the piece of shit sketch is basically two sketches in one: Robinson at the baby shower, followed by a musical flashback to his Dangerous Nights days.) 

So what, you might wonder, are Robinson and Kanin doing making a new series, HBO's The Chair Company, where Robinson not only plays the same character for a 30-minute episode, but plays that character — a guy who shares more than a few obsessive traits with figures from various ITYSL sketches — for at least eight consecutive episodes?