What “After the Hunt” Gets Right
Annie Julia Wyman, the writer of The Chair, shares her thoughts on Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. In 2017, she left academia for the entertainment industry due to the challenging job market for humanities Ph.D.s, only to co-create The Chair, a Netflix show centered on the academic world she had departed.
Exploring Academic Life in The Chair
During the writing process, Wyman and her co-creator discussed the complex personalities of professors. They can be “uptight, self-aggrandizing, depressive, controlling, petty, kind, idealistic, noble, and wise—sometimes all at the same time.” They also explored the material struggles familiar to many academics, hoping to connect with viewers beyond the academic world.
The fictional Pembroke campus in the show reflects real trends: corporatization of universities, declining humanities enrollment, and professors growing anxious and defensive. The professors, especially the older white men, complicate life for the English Department head, played by Sandra Oh—the first woman of color in that role—who is determined to preserve faculty jobs.
Dramatic Conflict and Relationships
This setting creates rich dramatic tension, further intensified by the protagonist’s romantic involvement with a colleague: “a sad, white, not-quite-so-old dude who can’t stop kicking the hornet’s nest of campus cancel culture.”
Reception of The Chair
When The Chair debuted in 2021, Wyman worried it might seem too unflattering or brutally honest about the academic field to her former colleagues. However, those fears proved unfounded.
“They can be uptight, self-aggrandizing, depressive, controlling, petty, kind, idealistic, noble, and wise—sometimes all at the same time.”
“When The Chair was released in 2021, 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.”
Summary: Annie Julia Wyman’s experience in academia informs The Chair, portraying the professional and personal complexities of university professors amid institutional changes and cultural clashes.