What “After the Hunt” Gets Right
Annie Julia Wyman, writer of The Chair, reflects on Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. In 2017, she left academia for the entertainment industry—a move driven by the bleak job market for humanities Ph.D.s. Soon after, she co-created The Chair, a Netflix series set in the academic world she had just departed.
During the show’s development, Wyman and her co-creator explored the complex personalities of professors: their uptightness, self-aggrandizement, depression, control, pettiness, kindness, idealism, nobility, and wisdom—often all present at once. They also addressed a sense of material desperation familiar to many in academia, which they believed could resonate with non-academic viewers.
The fictional campus of Pembroke, where The Chair is set, is undergoing corporatization. Humanities enrollments are declining, causing professors to panic, compete, and retreat. The head of the English Department, played by Sandra Oh, is the first woman of color in that role and the only one determined to save their jobs. The show’s drama intensifies when she falls for a colleague—a melancholic, white, middle-aged man who constantly provokes campus cancel culture.
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.
Wyman’s experience highlights the tensions and contradictions within academia, as well as the challenges faced by those trying to preserve its values in a changing world.
Annie Julia Wyman’s insights reveal the messy reality of academic life and the courage it takes to challenge its norms while staying true to its ideals.