There are series for everyone. There are series "for the not-like-others" - you know, those enlightened ones who tweet "I haven't watched a single episode of Game of Thrones. Yes, I exist," and then go to Reddit to discuss whether everyone noticed that in Severance, the characters' keyboards lack Escape and Control keys.

And then there are series for second-order not-like-others, who look at even that discourse with polite bewilderment and don't go there even to demonstratively leave. And no, I'm not talking about Pluribus (it's not elitist enough either, pfft).

I'm talking about The Chair Company, which this year is leading by a wide margin in your nomination for "left-handed thread," "WTF of the Year," or whatever you call the most deranged, unhinged, and thoroughly shell-shocked works. Personally, I like the word starting with "e" that rhymes with my niece Nina's name.

It all starts quite comically: Ron Trospar, a regional manager of a hypermarket chain, speaks in front of future employees of a new store. Right on stage, the chair breaks under him, and Ron ends up on the floor - in every sense. Humiliation demands satisfaction. Trospar tries to complain to the chair manufacturer, but it turns out that such a company doesn't exist. Well, it does exist, but instead of a furniture factory, there's an empty warehouse with a huge red ball inside and a scruffy man in a terrible shirt at the exit. The man brandishes a piece of plumbing pipe and demands that Ron stop sticking his nose where it doesn't belong.

It continues as a corporate thriller, made by people who hate corporate thrillers: with conspiracy theories that suddenly turn out to be part of other, bigger conspiracy theories. Each new hypothesis of Ron's seems absolutely logical until the next episode, where logic suddenly dies, and the series cheerfully rolls on without brakes or safety nets.

The Coen brothers' characters live in David Lynch's plot, conversations miss the point, and any attempt to understand only gets more stuck in the sticky furniture surrealism. The world behaves as if the conspiracy isn't so much hiding as it just doesn't see the need to pretend. The most unsettling thing is that the series never winks at the viewer in a "relax, it's just absurd" way. No, paranoia here is not a genre trick but a working mode. The norm. A state you are gradually transplanted into, like an office chair, testing whether it will crack under you or hold.

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