Sandra Oh stars in “The Chair” streaming on Netflix. IMDb photo

It’s like jelly beans when I was 8, and M&Ms, and then popcorn and Pringles.

My sister said to me over and over, “Don’t you want to save some for later?” No, I’ve never learned to “save some for later.”

Today, with the advent of streaming, this trip down memory lane brings me to Sandra Oh and her new limited series, “The Chair,” now streaming on Netflix.

Co-creators Amanda Peet and Annie Wyman set us down in Pembroke University, a fictional New England liberal arts college, where there’s snow on some streets and it’s autumn on others.

“Chair” presents a welcome cast of familiar, old faces we’ve come to trust over the past 10 years:

Bob Balaban, the quirky scientist who created HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey;” David Morse, a solid presence in “House” and “ St. Elsewhere;” and Holland Taylor, once gorgeous and smoky, now aged to gold and given the best lines.

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“The Chair” isn’t perfect. It’s edgy, and sometimes a soggy sandwich of drama and soft comedy that sounds like it was written at the last moment.

But it’s Sandra Oh, and that’s enough for me. I would watch Oh play the villain in a James Bond feature.

This is a new Sandra, as Ji-Yoon, the first woman of color to chair the English department. Sandra is slightly puffy in the cheeks, and full of hair. But it’s her eyes. It was always her eyes.

This is not the troubled, razor-thin, feisty doctor of “Grays’s Anatomy.” This is a shorter, idealistic Oh, a teacher who lives with her adopted daughter and her Korean father.

There’s a guy here named Bill (Jay Duplass), who’s part friend, colleague, and, we’re hoping, sweetheart. It might not happen, because Bill is trouble: an unshaven, brilliant and trouble-making incipient drunk. So of course you’ll love him. A lovely co-ed does, and that could be more trouble.

So, along with a can of Pringles and a bowl of M&Ms, I’ve finished ‘The Chair,” but I won’t say another word. The chair is in your room now.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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