It’s very rare that when my mother calls me from home, she talks about herself. That’s why I was more than a little surprised when she called me last week, only to steal my usual opening line: “Guess what I’ve been doing?”
She went on to tell me she’s been using her Netflix subscription again and had just finished a “really good show” that she thinks I would enjoy, too. Her recommendation of choice? The Chair on Netflix.
The six-episode comedy-drama created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman centers around Sandra Oh’s character, Jiyoon Kim, the newest chair of the English Department at a fictional university that is failing to attract students to its liberal arts programs. Oh portrays a struggling chair of an ancient, crumbling department who is desperately trying to balance her adoptive Mexican daughter and crush on colleague and recent widower Bill Dobson.
The entire show clocks in at a mere three hours, but every moment is memorable. From show-stealer JuJu, Kim’s menace of a daughter, to the ridiculous banter between the fossils that are the English professors, there is never a dull scene. I, for one, can understand why my own mother so thoroughly enjoyed the show despite the holes in her English. She told me it probably isn’t like anything I’d ever watched before, and she was right: Sandra Oh is playing an Asian-American character that is so rarely, if ever, portrayed on screen. Her character is not reduced to just a person of color, but one that is accurately vulnerable, intelligent, and passionate. Jiyoon’s tears are just as achingly relatable as her laughter.
In an interview with USA Today, Oh further suggests the importance of her role as Jiyoon in a relevant time: “to be able to play a character, that is hopefully, an honest portrayal of a person, a woman, a woman of color, a woman of color who is at a certain position in her life, a single mom, someone who’s trying to be a good daughter, and then maybe have a romance with a friend and keep her institution going, is my activism.” Her passionate speech in the Stop AAPI Hate movement happened just months earlier before The Chair was released.
The Chair expresses such sentiment through satirical comedy centered around the politics of academia with charming wit and cast to match. The reviews are in, and I have to say: My mom’s got taste!
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