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HBO has asked—not just once, but numerous times, in bold and underlined type—that reviewers of Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s The Chair Company refrain from describing the workplace mishap that sets the entire series in motion. It seems like an absurd request, not just because it’s the equivalent of asking someone recounting the plot of Star Wars to keep quiet about the whole Death Star thing, but because “the chair incident” in question is so trivial, hardly the kind of thing you’d expect to be treated like a state secret. (The network’s official one-sentence summary describes it as “an embarrassing incident at work,” which honestly gets you 90 percent of the way there.) But rather than roll my eyes at an act of spoilerphobic overkill, I’ve come to see the restriction as an ingenious conceptual prank, because while the chair incident might not seem like much to anyone else, it’s a very, very big deal to Ron Trosper.

Ron is what, in a short span of years, has already been established as a classic Tim Robinson character, a middle-aged man with a nebulous office job whose emotions fluctuate between starry-eyed idealism and apoplectic rage. The short-form comedy of Robinson’s Netflix series I Think You Should Leave—created, like The Chair Company, by Robinson and Kanin—matched his history as a writer for Saturday Night Live. (The pair also helped create the short-lived cult sitcom Detroiters.) But though I Think You Should Leave’s sketches were brief and disconnected, sometimes cutting off abruptly after less than a minute, its three seasons painted a cumulative portrait of a particular type of guy, one who thinks he’s figured out the rules by which the world operates but can’t seem to manage to play by them. On the outside, he’s loudly entitled and perennially aggrieved, but the slightest challenge to his brittle authority prompts an immediate collapse. He’s either screaming at the top of his lungs or breaking into a desperate sweat, and either way, he’s difficult to watch.

Rather than easing up, Robinson’s recent projects have doubled down on that discomfort. In Andrew DeYoung’s movie Friendship, he’s a lonely suburban dad who becomes obsessed with befriending Paul Rudd’s TV weatherman once he discovers they’re neighbors. Rudd’s character is a smug, insufferable dope, like a child’s version of what a cool grown-up would be, but the worse he treats Robinson’s hapless schmo, the more intense his platonic overtures become. By the end, Robinson’s character had debased himself in such spectacularly cringey fashion that I could barely stand to look at the screen—and I’m glad I watched the movie in a theater, because I might not have been able to stick it out at home—but that excruciating anxiety had also become perversely fascinating, almost a solid object hovering in the air beside me. And the longer Robinson and his collaborators force you to sit with it, the more engrossing it becomes. The Chair Company is eight episodes long.

With a beautiful wife, Barb (Lake Bell), two kids—Natalie (Sophia Lillis), who’s about to get married, and Seth (Will Price), who’s fielding athletic recruitment offers from several colleges—and a management position at a local firm, Ron Trosper has what as recently as a few decades ago might have been considered the perfect life. But even when his family gathers at a restaurant to celebrate his recent run of success, he can’t sit back and enjoy it. In the first episode, which DeYoung directed, a waitress slides up the Trospers’ table to gush over Seth’s performance in a recent game, and when the son tries to shift the center of attention back to his dad’s big news, that he’s been assigned to oversee the construction of a new shopping mall, the young woman just looks confused: Do they even still build those? That night, as he tosses and turns in bed, Ron screams his frustrations into the void: “I swear, I have the worst pillow in town!” Not all the objects of Ron’s ire are inanimate. For one, there’s the peppy co-worker (Jim Downey) who’s decided that the best way to keep everyone’s spirits up is to regularly fill the air with soap bubbles. But it’s telling that he feels so victimized by a cloth sack stuffed with polyfill—and thus not entirely surprising when his enemies list expands to include office furniture.

What’s important about “the chair incident” is not what it is but how it makes Ron feel: humiliated, undermined, singled out. And because he feels that way, it must be somebody’s fault. At first, he claims to be acting out of civic concern, sending “PLEASE READ! VERY BIG PROBLEM!” emails to the generic customer service address on the chair manufacturer’s website. But when those emails bounce back, he becomes obsessed with the idea that there’s something more sinister at stake, a vast scheme to … well, he’s not quite sure, and The Chair Company is in no rush to clear things up. By the end of the first episode, when a drainpipe-wielding goon comes out of the darkness to tell him to knock it off, the implication is strong that something is going on. But it’s as if you’re watching a paranoid thriller where the shadowy secret society’s aim is not to assassinate a presidential candidate or start World War III but to make a middle-aged white man look foolish at work.

As Ron’s investigations take him further afield—as he finds out just how high this thing goes—The Chair Company takes on a layer of increasingly surreal menace: less Office Space, more Mulholland Drive. He tracks the goon’s flamboyantly patterned shirt to a clothing store whose clerk insists he knows just who it belongs to, because the strained buttons around the gut could belong only to a man who’s “at his limit.” The clerk repeats that phrase several times in an even, affectless monotone, and the more he does, the more it starts to feel as if he’s speaking in code, gesturing at a reality that neither we nor Ron can quite make out. The actor who plays the part doesn’t seem to have any previous screen credits, which might account for the off-kilter delivery, but even the series’ seasoned pros, like Lake Bell and Lou Diamond Phillips, who plays Ron’s glad-handing boss, seem to have been coached to act as if they don’t know how to act. Robinson is a singular performer with an awfully narrow range, which he periodically pushes himself beyond for the sake of comedic unease. (You don’t see a man crying; you see an actor trying to play one, and wince at how far he is from pulling it off.) But it’s not just a matter of making the other actors lower themselves to his level. Their flat, almost rote line readings keep us in Ron’s permanently baffled shoes, unable to comprehend what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. And that makes the whole world feel like one big conspiracy, a place where people carry on as if their behavior makes sense when it’s clear that they’re all out of their minds.

Four hours of this is, to be clear, a lot. (I’ve seen only seven of eight episodes, but the last could be half an hour of bunnies bouncing on trampolines and it wouldn’t change things.) But the a-lotness is very much the point, and the more its steadily spiraling plot unravels, the more sense Robinson’s bug-eyed rantings start to make. The Chair Company’s office-supply cabal may be utterly ludicrous, but it runs side by side with a string of more plausible yet equally absurd indignities: getting hauled into Human Resources because of an inadvertent impropriety, or having to reconceive an entire project because of a minor online gripe. “I’m right about a lot of things that people have zero idea that they even know is going on,” Ron tells one skeptical co-worker, and though his grasp of the truth is as shaky as his syntax, he’s righter than he knows, if not as right as he thinks.