Review: Sandra Oh is a delight in Netflix's college-skewering comedy 'The Chair'

It's not a game of thrones, but Sandra Oh is certainly stuck playing games in Netflix's "The Chair."

The venerated "Grey's Anatomy" and "Killing Eve" actress' latest star turn comes in the Netflix comedy, created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman and produced by "Game of Thrones" creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

"The Chair" (streaming Friday, ★★★ out of four) finds Oh playing the embattled head of an unpopular English department at a fictional Ivy League university. She's hoping for a more inclusive future at her college, but that optimism is quickly quashed by the realities and idiocies of modern academia.

It's a role aptly suited for Oh, who has sometimes gotten to show off her comedic chops in other projects, but completely lets loose here as her character falters – and sometimes literally falls – throughout the six-episode series. Like most college students, "The Chair" is incredibly ambitious at what it will achieve in its short time and occasionally falls flat, but overall the series beats the metaphorical curve.

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Oh plays Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman and person of color to chair Pembroke University's department. She takes up her new position at the start of the series, but her team is already in crisis. Enrollment in English courses is down; the dean (David Morse) asks Ji-Yoon to pressure her oldest colleagues – played by the wonderful Bob Balaban and Holland Taylor – to retire; and the most popular English professor, Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), is a mess, grieving for his wife, who died a year ago, and failing to show up on time to his own classes.

Bill and Ji-Yoon have a strong, unspoken mutual attraction that's complicated by their professional relationship. At home, Ji-Yoon is struggling to parent her young adoptive daughter, Juju (Everly Carganilla).

Ji-Yoon's professional life gets harder when Bill, trying to be an animated teacher while lecturing on fascism and modernism, demonstrates the Nazi salute in class, a moment caught on video by his students that snowballs into a campuswide scandal. Ji-Yoon wants to protect her friend, but Bill's pride leads him to double down and exacerbate the incident until his job is on the line. And he might bring Ji-Yoon down with him.

In addition to Oh's charms, "Chair" is a darkly funny satire, skewering aspects of modern higher education with veritable glee. The characters are sharply written and feel real and grounded, even as the events surrounding them become more crazed. Duplass, who might have been the protagonist of a lesser series, revels in playing a part as self-destructive as Bill, a man who can barely get out of bed in the morning, let alone defend his values as an educator.

If some of these antics feel a bit too over the top to be realistic, you need only to look at recent higher-education headlines to find that it's not all that outrageous. A conflict over the tenure track of a young superstar Black female professor, Yaz (Nana Mensah), recalls New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones rejecting a job at the University of North Carolina for a position at Howard University after the former initially didn't offer her tenure.

Occasionally, the series falls victim to Hollywood's bad habit of overcriticizing youth, implying that concerns of the protesting Pembroke students are misguided and overly "woke." "The Chair" is not the first to characterize Generation Z in this way, and it's certainly not the worst. But it could benefit from giving young people a little more benefit of the doubt.

Still, there is more nuance here than in many movies, books and TV shows in which progress butts up against institution and tradition. It offers situations where there are few good choices and even fewer right answers, and it also doesn't pretend that everyone will get a happy ending. Ji-Yoon is not the ultimate paragon of goodness – she makes plenty of mistakes and needs to figure out how to deal with her flaws, just like the rest of us.

But more than anything, it's Oh's unique talents, and her superb chemistry with her co-stars, that gets "Chair" a passing grade. Or maybe even an A-minus.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'The Chair' review: Sandra Oh is a delight in Netflix's college comedy