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LA Times (Nancy Wang Yuen) review
NPR (Aisha Harris) review
AV Club (Arielle Bernstein) review
The Chair [TV Series -2021] (created by Amanda Peet, Annie Wyman) is a six part (30 min each, so three hours in total) television series that premiered on Aug 20, 2021 on Netflix.
The series follows the life of Ji-Yoon Kim (played by Sandra Oh), a fictionalized tenured English Literature professor at an invented liberal arts college named "Pembroke University" somewhere in the North East, upon her being "bumped up" to become the first woman and first person of color to Chair the school's English Department.
Yes, while she _may_ have found herself having shattered "the glass ceiling," it feels more like she's been put on "a glass cliff."
The problems come immediately after a gracious "first staff meeting" where she's reminded by a still deferential, still smiling, _older_ faculty member that "the Department Chair sits at the head of the table."
After said meeting where she also gives a clear-eyed, even somewhat Churchillian speech about facing the department's challenges, she makes a visit to her direct boss, Dean Paul Larsen (played by David Morse). He promptly gives her a "hit list" marking (with yellow florescent highlighter) the three "highest paid, yet least productive" faculty members -- yes, they are all older and, of course, ALL tenured -- who he'd like her to persuade to take the retirement package that the university was offering.
This conflict between the old and the new, the settled and the striving plays out through the whole series, and to the series' credit, the points of view of all concerned are remarkably well presented, indeed honored.
All three of those older, "less productive" professors are white, two of them are male, one female, all three already enduring their "slights."
One, Eliot Renz (played by Bob Balaban) finds his course "American Letters from 1850-1890" (or something like that) is scheduled at exactly the same time as a far more popular class "Sex and the Novel" taught by a younger, far more dynamic African American professor Jaz(min) McCay (played by Nana Mansah). Yet, Eliot had been previously selected to chair Jaz' "tenure review" committee...
Another of the older professors, the woman, Joan Hambling (played by Holland Taylor), fares even worse finding her office moved to the basement of the University's "Wellness Center" (Gym) with barbells banging on the ceiling above her as she tries to think, take office hours, or otherwise function as the professor that she (still) is.
Another professor, Bill Dobson (played by Jay Duplass), younger, more Ji-Yoon's age, apparently _once_ "the star" of the Department (as well as its most recent Chair...), but now still reeling from the death of his wife a year before, is again a mix of entitlement and sorrow. Both his college aged daughter and Ji-Yoon beg him at different times: "Get your sh#t together." But he's not ready, or perhaps ... done.
Two lectures into his course: "Death of Modernism" (his first lecture was arguably a fire-able disaster as well...), Bill writes on the chalkboard "Nihilism," above it "Fascism," and proceeds to explain that much of the existential despair (!) of post-WW II, that is, postmodern literature was born of the world's experience of Fascism. To put an accent on this, he clicked his heels and made a Nazi salute in the direction of the word Fascism. Well ... someone in the class captured his Nazi salute, photoshopped an SS cap on him, and posted it on Twitter, and ... much of the rest of the story followed ...
Then to try to "save" Eliot's position, Ji-Yoon persuades him (and Jaz) to _combine_ their classes -- they were scheduled at the same time, and arguably covered similar material -- "selling" this to Eliot: "Well you are the chair of Jaz' tenure evaluation committee.
Well ... Eliot finds himself foundering in the midst of a lecture on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (it was a _classic example_ of "American Letters from the 1850s," AND certainly "a novel") noting Melville's personal struggles and that "he died penniless" and "never lived to know the enormous success of his seminal novel," to which an exasperated African American student raises his hand to ask: "Wasn't Melville a wife-beater?" (explaining probably in good part _why_ Melville died so ignominiously...).
Jaz tries to _save_ the situation by saying "I'll cover some of that in my lecture next time..."
At her lecture then, Jaz allows a group of the students perform _a rap poem_ which summarized _remarkably well_ both Melville's tortured (and self-destructive) life as well as the unattainable "purity" (in 19th century-speak) but frankly _unattainable_ WHITENESS (in current parlance) of the whale.
It was all _brilliant_ but one's left with the obvious / unavoidable question of whether someone like Jaz could possibly get a _fair evaluation_ from someone like Eliot.
And yes, it must be noted that _both_ Ji-Yoon and Jaz, arguably still _reflexively_ tried actually to "save" Eliot.
It's all brilliant and disturbing. What can one say? Five stars!
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