Growing up in New York City, Amanda Peet was an “unrepentant nerd.” The daughter of a shrink, she started psychoanalysis at the age of 14 and stayed in Manhattan for college in order to continue with her therapist. That desire to unravel emotional knots came in handy when the actress—a magnetic presence in Togetherness, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and The Whole Nine Yards who often found herself playing girlfriends and wives—began writing plays and TV scripts.
“Psychoanalysis is very much like literary analysis, like: What co*cktail of events created this or that hurtful scenario?” Peet muses over Zoom. “I enjoyed the part of analysis that is essentially making up a story with somebody else. It’s not unlike a writers room.”
Peet finally has a writers room of her own for the new Netflix series The Chair, created with academic-screenwriter Annie Julia Wyman. One part charming romcom and one part wry campus satire, The Chair is a six-part dramedy about, well, unrepentant nerds. It stars Sandra Oh as Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman appointed to be head of a fictional university’s antiquated English department.
“I feel like someone handed me a ticking time bomb because they wanted to make sure a woman was holding it when it explodes,” Ji-Yoon complains at one point. She is mostly surrounded by entrenched older white academics, played to the hilt by seasoned actors like Bob Balaban and Holland Taylor. They brag about their colonoscopies (“you could serve shrimp off my colon!”) and disdain contemporary teaching methods as practiced by young Black scholar Yaz (Nana Mensah), who has her students perform Hamilton-style musical numbers about Moby Dick and examines whether Melville was abusive to his wife.
Ji-Yoon wrangles with problems real-world academics will recognize all too well: declining enrollment, tightening budgets, gender and racial discrimination, politically sensitized students, and the increasing lure of celebrities. Meanwhile, she’s raising an adopted daughter and trying to be supportive of her best friend and object of romantic friction, Bill (Jay Duplass), a popular professor who’s become increasingly erratic since the recent death of his wife.
Curled up on her bed staring at the Zoom screen, Peet holds a glass of white wine that her nanny brought her. She is self-effacing and thoughtful as she discusses the insecurity that kept her from focusing on writing earlier in her life. Marrying novelist and Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff “changed everything for me,” she says. “The fact that he gave me the time of day—or I should say, he gave my writing the time of day.”
After making her playwriting debut with 2013’s The Commons of Pensacola (starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner), Peet co-wrote a children’s picture book with Andrea Troyer, who happens to be the wife of Thrones’ other co-creator, D.B. Weiss. The two women began trying to sell a TV series more than a decade ago; now they and their husbands all collaborate on The Chair, under the aegis of Benioff and Weiss’ production deal at Netflix.
Peet laughs easily, often breaking into a Julia Roberts-scale mega-smile. Over the course of an hour, she speaks about the inspiration for The Chair, becoming a first-time showrunner in midlife, and parenting shame—until one of her three children enters the room wailing pitifully, ending the interview and yanking Peet back into her multitasking reality.
Vanity Fair: The Chair is set in the English department of a university. Did you ever consider going into academia?
Amanda Peet: No! I was working on an idea with Jay Duplass about a widower who starts dating someone who’s his supervisor. It was a bunch of loose ends that I started to feel could all take place in a sort of claustrophobic workplace comedy. The more I interviewed [academics], the more I felt: these are just psychotic family dynamics happening over the course of many years. It seemed like a no brainer for a comedy.
You worked with the Duplasses on Togetherness. Did you start brainstorming The Chair after the series was canceled in 2016?
Yeah, we knew we wanted to work together so badly after Togetherness. Over the course of the last few years, we pitched each other various ideas, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this [widower] character in my head whose daughter had just left for college. So he’s in this empty house by himself, trying to put one foot in front of the other.
