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 entertainment—a move driven by the tough job market for humanities Ph.D.s.

Despite this shift, she co-created The Chair, a Netflix series set in the academic world she knew. During writing, her co-creator and she explored the complex personalities of professors: uptight, self-important, depressive, controlling, petty, kind, idealistic, noble, and wise, often all at once.

The show also highlights a material desperation familiar to academics and relatable to outsiders. The fictional campus of Pembroke is undergoing corporatization.

Humanities enrollments are falling.
Professors become anxious, competitive, and defensive.
Older white male faculty clash with Sandra Oh’s character, the first woman of color and English Department chair.
She is determined to save their jobs despite the tensions.

The creators found this dynamic compelling, especially when their heroine falls for a colleague—a troubled white man who challenges 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 view underscores the tangled realities of academic life with honesty and nuance.

Author’s summary: Wyman’s experience reveals the authentic challenges and contradictions within academia, captured vividly in The Chair and reflected in After the Hunt.

The Yale Review — 2025-11-04

What “After the Hunt” Gets Right

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