"I don't feel like I inherited an English department. I feel like I got handed a ticking time bomb because they wanted to make sure a woman was holding it when it explodes."
— Ji-yoon Kim
The Chair is an American comedy-drama Mini Series starring Sandra Oh as Professor Ji-yoon Kim, the first woman to become English department chair at her New England university. She must then navigate the staid old boy's club of academia, wrangle her friends and colleagues, and balance her work, family, and love lives.
Supporting actors include Jay Duplass, Nana Mensah, Holland Taylor, and Bob Balaban as Ji-yoon's colleagues.
The show was released on Netflix on August 20, 2021. It was cancelled after one season.
Tropes:
- As Himself: The dean recruits a celebrity as distinguished lecturer to help boost enrollment. Said lecturer is David Duchovny (himself a former English grad student), who appears in "The Last Bus In Town".
- Black and Nerdy: Yaz is a promising tenure-track English academic at Pembroke University. She's also the department's sole black woman, and a lot of her subplot is navigating the implicit racism and misogyny she faces from her older white colleagues.
- Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Ji-yoon is the first woman of color to lead Pembroke University's English department.
- Career Versus Man: Ji-yoon is department chair, but has feelings for a problematic coworker that she tries to juggle with her duties to the university.
- Interracial Adoption Struggles: Korean-American Ji-yoon Kim has a young adopted Mexican daughter nicknamed Ju Ju, who is increasingly distressed because she can tell she isn't biologically related to the Kims.
- Job Title: The show's title, The Chair, refers to being the chair of a department in a university.
- Values Dissonance: Invoked. The 2020s English department members often need to discuss if entries in the literary canon like The Canterbury Tales or Moby-Dick are still worth teaching when they were written for audiences from centuries ago and their authors held outdated values.
- You're Not My Father: Ju Ju tells her adopted mom Ji-yoon that she isn't actually Ju Ju's mother, saddening Ji-yoon.
