The Chair – Picture: Netflix
Over the summer of 2021, Netflix released its prestigious new drama headlined by Sandra Oh. With widespread praise from outlets, will the series be getting a second season at Netflix? It looks unlikely at least when it comes to viewing figures.
Debuting on August 20th, 2021 the show was one of the first major titles to come from David Benioff and D.B. Weiss who signed an expansive overall deal with Netflix in 2019.
Sandra Oh headlined the comedy which is set in a major US university and follows the trials and tribulations of an English department head.
As mentioned, the show received glowing reviews from the press with it holding an 85% on RottenTomatoes at the time of publishing. Similarly, audience scores were high too.
The show wasn’t dubbed as a limited series so a second season was left open. With that said, the show did tie up most loose ends with a few lingering questions about the future despite Dr Ji-Yoon Kim being ousted from her position in the final episode.
Will there be a season 2 of The Chair?
Official Renewal Status for The Chair: Not yet renewed
Coming up on six months since the release of The Chair, we haven’t officially heard of any indication that the show will be returning.
Our gut feeling, however, is that the show will not be getting a renewal due to poor performance.
Thanks to newly released top 10 hourly data, we can also take a look at its performance on the platform and things aren’t particularly pretty.
The series only featured in the hourly global top 10s for a single week. The series obviously aired on August 20th but didn’t feature in the first week period between August 16th and August 22nd. It needed over 10.43M hours viewed to be included.
Week 2 of release the series climbed to rank 4 gaining 14.02 million hours viewed on the platform.
In week 3 the series fell out of the top 10 where it would’ve only needed above 9.14 million hours to beat out CoComelon. That means that from week 2 to week 3 the series experienced at least a 35% drop in viewership.
If we compare hourly data with other debuts for comedy series around the same time, we can see Never Have I Ever S2 managed 58.38 million in week 1 and Sex Education S3 pulled in 125.77 million.
The Chair – Picture: Netflix
Looking at raw top 10 data for countries, things look just as bad. In the United States, where the series is produced, the show only managed to spend 7 days in the overall top 10 and 14 days in the TV top 10. For renewals, we typically have to see around 28 days of strong performance in the hopes of getting a renewal.
The series failed to remain in the top 10s longer than 19 days in any single country.
IMDb MovieMeter shows the show climbed to #13 but soon began dropping off on a steep curve.
Moviemeter Chart for The Chair
Annie Julia Wyman’s Twitter bio suggests that she’s currently hard at work on other projects including being a writer and producer on projects at FX, Hulu, and HBO Max.
Sandra Oh is currently hard at work on upcoming projects The Tiger’s Apprentice, Umma, and Turning Red as well as continuing to star on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, voicing on Prime Video’s Invincible, and appearing in the final season of Killing Eve.
In conclusion, it seems highly unlikely that Netflix gives The Chair a second season order but never say never.
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are working a host of other upcoming Netflix projects. The Three-Body Problem is their major new project which is being filmed throughout 2022. Metal Lords is also due to release in 2022 with The Overstory being one of our most anticipated projects of theirs.
Would you have liked to see The Chair return for season 2?