YMMV / The Chair (2014)

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Despite barely making any appearances in the series due to having to leave town during most of it, Zachary Quinto became popular and beloved to fans hate-watching it in 2020 due to Quinto, unlike the other producers on the project, bluntly calling out the obvious flaws of Shane’s movie and refusing to keep his name on it. Especially after seeing so much footage of the other producers constantly making excuses for the tasteless jokes rampant throughout Shane’s movie, fans saw Quinto as a breath of fresh air. He also gets bonus points for praising Anna’s movie and keeping his name on her project after we’ve seen everything she went through, including being The Unfavorite to writer Dan Schoffer throughout production.
  • Neal Dodson is a more minor case due to not being as vocal about his grievances, but he has become popular and beloved as well for being the only other producer to agree with Quinto and take his name off of Shane’s project while keeping his name on Anna’s.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The heavily featured rape jokes in Not Cool (even though they relied on Double Standard Rape: Female on Male to get away with it) apparently didn't sit well with Anna, who is a survivor of sexual assault, and played a serious role in her breaking her mask of civility and angrily calling out Shane himself and The Chair for tying her public image to his a year later.
  • For that matter, Shane generally benefits from the much-decried fact that most of the higher-ups on The Chair and the critics excoriating his movie know nothing about him or his career — he's actually on his best behavior here, and looking at his YouTube content from around 2014 makes him look much worse. A lot of his former fans revisiting this series recoil at just how codependent he is at Lauren on this show and how much work she does for him, when her appearances in his sketches and as his podcast co-host often involved him gratuitously needling her with Greedy Jew jokes. His interactions with his very young female fanbase also come off really, really badly in light of his much more blatantly inappropriate interactions with teen girls in other contexts (like making his 12-year-old cousin twerk on camera) and with his continued efforts to downplay them or treat them like isolated incidents.
  • Some of the post-2016 discourse around this series points out how much darker the theme feels now of an emotionally fragile, unstable male narcissist surrounded by yes-men and with a hardcore fanbase that goes along with everything he says beating a much more qualified woman in a contest, with all the experts and traditional gatekeepers appalled by this but being powerless to stop it (although this is softened somewhat by Shane, for all of his faults, seemingly having slightly more humility than the public will most likely ever see from Trump, and Anna not having anything in her life resembling any of Hilary Clinton's scandals. If anything, this makes Anna more sympathetic, as the fact that she doesn't have the kind of history that made as many people against Clinton as they were makes her more clearly the good party in the reality show, and her loss to Shane even more tragic.).
• Jerkass Woobie: Shane himself, arguably — his abominable behavior is very clearly not because he feels good about himself and where he is in his career. He gets genuinely choked up and on the verge of tears multiple times, both in talking-head interviews and right in front of his team during meetings. There's a very memorable moment where he asks for just "one small change" from the editor they've hired to finish post-production when he couldn't, and they immediately agree to it — after all, they have to, the contest gives him final cut — but he still continues to go into a Creator Breakdown about how badly hurt his feelings have been by being constantly criticized and undermined. YMMV, very much, if this actually makes you feel bad for him or it comes off as just another way for him to manipulate his audience and his colleagues.
• Love to Hate: People rewatching this series in hindsight are pretty much just here for Shane Dawson acting horribly and being called out and insulted by Zachary Quinto, professional film critics and the residents of the city of Pittsburgh. Most of its audience as of 2020 is people looking back on Shane's career after his career finally tanked.
• Overshadowed by Controversy:
  • The huge backlash against Shane basically takes over the story completely by the end of the series, overshadowing everything else the series was trying to say about filmmaking in general and especially eclipsing pretty much everything about Anna and her film. It ends up not being about the world of indie film and first-time directors, but specifically about what happens when a YouTube star offends the entire film industry by making a movie where a homeless man eats excrement. Anna, for her part, seems to be unhappy enough about the fact that no one even talks about her movie except in the context of this show and Shane Dawson's career that she changed her professional nom de guerre (to A.M. Lukas) to shed her connection to it.
  • The size of the backlash to Not Cool winning the contest pretty much killed any hopes for this series getting a Season 2, especially with Zachary Quinto being very publicly unhappy about the basic format of the show (giving a $600,000 budget and final cut to a first-time filmmaker with no traditional credentials) putting him in the position of having to take his name off of a film that didn't meet basic standards of quality.
• Retroactive Recognition: Multiple actors from these films went on to more visible roles afterwards:
  • Cherami Leigh, who stars in Not Cool as Tori, was already very well known for her anime and video game voiceover roles, such as Lucy Heartfilia in the English dub of Fairy Tail, Asuna Yuuki in Sword Art Online, and Komaru Naegi in Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, but has continued to rise in notoriety since then, taking on roles such as Makoto Niijima in Persona 5, Rhea in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and even V in Cyberpunk 2077.
  • Michelle Veintimilla, who plays Janie in Not Cool, went on to play Bridgit Pike, a.k.a. Firefly, on Gotham and to star as Hayden on The I-Land.
  • Rachel Keller, who stars in Hollidaysburg as Tori, went on to play Syd Barrett in Legion (2017).
• The Woobie:
  • Anna, once it becomes abundantly clear there's no way she's going to win the contest and she has to swallow her pride and be civil to Shane about her situation.
  • We also get a pretty devastating moment where the camera crew catches a long, lingering shot of Lauren looking abjectly defeated standing outside the room after Shane shoos her away for bringing "negative energy" to the meeting.

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