‘The Chair’ Canceled at Netflix; Won’t Return for Season 2

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 get a second season on Netflix? The answer is no, according to various actors, including Sandra Oh, who has now confirmed it won’t return.

Debuting on August 20th, 2021, the show was one of the first major titles 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 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: Canceled

After six months since the release of The Chair, we haven’t officially heard of any indication that the show will be returning but we do think that it’s likely been ghost-canceled.

Early on, the show’s future looked bleak, given its poor performance in Netflix’s top 10s. Thanks to, at the time, newly released top 10 hourly data, we can also take a look at its performance on the platform, and things weren’t pretty.

The series only featured in the hourly global top 10s for a single week. The series 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.

Let’s 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. We typically have to see around 28 days of strong performance for renewals in the hopes of getting a renewal.

The series failed to remain in the top 10s longer than 19 days in any 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 was the first to put doubt on a second season. In an interview with Variety ahead of the final season of Killing Eve. She told them:

“No one’s called me, so I’m guessing that’s not happening. I would have loved it, because I just thought that there was so much material there to potentially explore. Because the setting and the characters were established… I’m just happy that it happened, it was a great experience. But I am sad that it’s over.”

Then at the TCA’s in January 2023, Amanda Peet confirmed to reporters that The Chair had been canceled.

“We weren’t picked up,” Peet confirmed. “Sandra and I wish we had been.”

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are working on a host of other upcoming Netflix projects. The Three-Body Problem is their major new project which is being filmed throughout 2022.

Would you have liked to see The Chair return for season 2?