What “After the Hunt” Gets Right
In 2017, Annie Julia Wyman left academia for the entertainment industry—reflecting the precarious job market faced by many humanities Ph.D.s. She later cocreated The Chair, a Netflix series inspired by the world she had just departed.
During the show's development, Wyman and her cocreator explored the complex personalities of professors—individuals who could be uptight, self-important, melancholic, generous, and idealistic, sometimes all at once. They wanted to portray both the intellectual beauty and the professional despair within academia.
The fictional campus of Pembroke embodies this tension. As the institution grows more corporate and humanities enrollments decline, faculty members become defensive and combative. Older, white male professors in particular challenge the authority of the English Department’s chair, portrayed by Sandra Oh, who is the first woman of color in the role and determined to protect her colleagues despite their flaws.
Layered into the drama is a romantic subplot involving the chair and a well-meaning but self-destructive male colleague entangled in controversies over campus cancel culture. Wyman believed this dynamic offered fertile ground for both humor and critique.
“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.”
Author’s Summary
Annie Julia Wyman reflects on how The Chair and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt both capture academic ambition, vulnerability, and the struggle for authenticity in changing institutions.