Severance, created by Dan Erickson, is one of the most disturbing and inventive new tv shows of the year so far. Featuring fantastic performances, chilling cinematography, and stellar direction, it’s part of Apple TV+’s salvo of recent quality content as it vies to make its mark in the competitive streaming landscape.
Severance takes place in an alternate world where employees working on the ‘severed floor’ of the Lumon corporation undergo a procedure that separates their consciousness and memories of their work lives from their personal lives, essentially dividing their minds into two halves. Mark Scout (Adam Scott) is the newly-promoted department chief or ‘Macro Data Refinement’, where he works on a retro-styled computer, doing confusingly mundane tasks. Mark has his hands full handling a new teammate, Helly (Britt Lower) who repeatedly tries to quit the company. Meanwhile, his ‘outie’ runs into Petey, who was his best friend in Lumon and is part of an underground faction who are trying to thwart Lumon’s ambitions to make severance available to the public at large.
Ben Stiller, who directs six of the nine episodes of the first season, had a big hand in instilling a heightened dread into the scenes taking place on the severed floor. They are shot oppressively bright, whereas external scenes have a darker aesthetic. There’s a clash between futurism and anachronism on the severed floor. The MDR room, for instance, is green-carpeted with only four workstations in the center, and the white hallways are maze-like.
Adam Scott is the clear standout of the season, which is saying something since it also boasts heavyweights like Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken.
Like Oscar Isaac in Moon Knight, Scott portrays the facial nuances and posture differences between his two selves well, switching between them in a flash whenever there is a transition between Mark’s ‘innie’ and ‘outie. Britt Lower also does well with a crucial character whose dual nature demonstrates how different a person can be with two sets of memories.
In fact, Severance does a lot with its limited list of characters. Not everyone’s character arc gets resolved by the end of the season, but the show progresses them just enough to keep you hooked for the next season.
if you don’t have misgivings about office life, you will have about a million of them after watching Severance.
It’s unsettling to see how the innies, especially Dylan (Zach Cherry), cling to small, often trivial comforts like finger warmers and ‘waffle parties’ in the face of crushing corporate monotony. And then there’s the subtle humor of the show, such as Mark’s innie having a revelatory experience reading his brother-in-law’s superficial self-help book filled with inane wordplays.
Doing a mystery show is often difficult, especially in a post-Lost world where there’s the danger of never being able to resolve those mysteries satisfyingly enough. It’s too early to tell with Severance, but it has already shown enough about Lumon and its outside world and progressed the main plot in an exciting direction. Let’s hope the second season can maintain the show’s eerie tone while exploring new territory with its story.