What “After the Hunt” Gets Right
Annie Julia Wyman, writer of The Chair, reflects on Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt and her own experiences in academia. In 2017, she left the academic world for the entertainment industry, a move motivated by the challenging job market for humanities Ph.D.s. Yet, this shift led her to co-create The Chair, a Netflix series that explores the academic environment she once inhabited.
The Complexities of Academic Life
During the show's development, Wyman and her co-creator examined the varied personalities of professors. They noted how faculty can be simultaneously uptight, self-aggrandizing, depressive, controlling, petty, kind, idealistic, noble, and wise. They also identified a sense of material desperation common among academics that might resonate with non-academic viewers.
Setting and Conflict in The Chair
The show is set at Pembroke, a fictional university undergoing corporatization amid declining humanities enrollment. This creates tension among faculty, especially among older white men, complicating the role of Sandra Oh’s character, the first woman of color to head the English Department. She is determined to save their jobs, even as she navigates difficult interpersonal dynamics and a fraught campus culture.
“Our professors start freaking out, clawing at each other, retrenching. They—especially the old white guys—make life very hard for the head of the English Department.”
Wyman felt this set-up offered rich dramatic potential, especially as her protagonist falls for a colleague who challenges campus cancel culture.
Reception and Reflection
When The Chair premiered in 2021, Wyman feared it might be seen by her academic friends and former mentors as harsh and unflattering—too honest about the silliness within the field. However, those concerns proved unfounded.
“I worried that it would strike my friends and former mentors in academia as wildly unflattering: undignified, too truthful about how silly our field can be. But those worries turned out to be unwarranted.”
Author’s Summary
The series captures the complexity and contradictions of academic life while humanizing its characters and exposing the challenges in modern humanities departments.