The Frustrations of “Severance”
The Apple TV+ show is middling as a corporate satire but profound as a mystery box.
The most compulsively bingeable show I’ve seen in the past few months is a game show for children. On Create the Escape, a group of kids imagines and builds an elaborate escape room—the kind you find in strip malls alongside laser tag—that their parents then have to navigate, solving a series of puzzles and riddles to find their way out. I’ve never been in an escape room myself, but I can testify that it is pretty fun to watch a group of adults buy into the stakes of their silly situation, shouting at one another as they work to avoid rubber tentacles and other traps laid by their offspring. Everything in the room is a big goof, but it’s hard to maintain that perspective when you’re the one in the escape room.
I thought of Create the Escape a lot while I was watching the second season of AppleTV+’s beloved sci-fi series Severance. The show, created by Dan Erickson, occasionally has the flavor of a prestige-produced escape room. Every moment animated by questionable stakes that feel real in the moment but might be wholly imaginary; every plot development awaiting us on the other side of a puzzle; the feeling that some unseen somebody is off-screen laughing at the mayhem that ensues.
Produced and directed mostly by Ben Stiller, the show’s first season debuted to acclaim and obsession in 2022. Despite its many twists and inversions, the concept of Severance is rather simple and instantly compelling: A cultish company called Lumon has invented a procedure whereby employees can “sever” their work and home lives. “Severed” employees show up in the morning, and, once they enter a special elevator to the “severed” floor of Lumon HQ, a brain implant activates, causing them to forget everything about their lives outside the company. Severance, the technique, enforces a radical work-life balance by essentially creating a second consciousness that has only ever existed amid the cubicles and sparkling white hallways of Lumon. Outies—the people who have chosen to sever themselves—don’t know what their Innies—the versions of themselves that work all day at Lumon—are up to, and vice versa.
Severance follows a quartet of Innies—Mark (Adam Scott) and his colleagues Irving (John Turturro), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Helly (Britt Lower)—as the boundary between their lives inside Lumon and outside of it becomes more and more dangerously porous. When it premiered in 2022, it nimbly, and probably at least partially accidentally, attended to a wide variety of pandemic-era tensions and traumas. Mark, the show’s protagonist, decides to undergo the severance procedure in order to escape the grief he feels after the recent loss of his wife. It’s hard not to see how a show about the complexity of the grieving process, about alienation from labor, about the passive-aggressive intensity of being isolated with a pod of strangers, resonated with viewers at the time of its release. The season ended with our Innies, like us all, freshly awakened to the cruelties of a world they only half understood in the first place.
As the second season begins, the four are radicalized but still at the mercy of both the malevolent management of the company and the ignorance of their Outies. They split their time in Lumon between completing the opaque computer tasks that are ostensibly their jobs and covertly investigating the reality of their situation through the mazelike passageways of the company. As I watched them do puzzles and progress, room by room, through the mystery of their existence, I couldn’t avoid thinking about the pleasures and frustrations of the escape room. Severance is an immensely satisfying puzzle box series, but it’s also a bit of a goof. As its puzzles compound and the rooms expand this season, I’ve found myself a bit lost. Does the show’s artifice conceal a deeper meaning—about love, about work, even about life and death themselves—or is it just artifice for artifice’s sake?
I’m of two minds about Severance. Severance, of course, is of two minds about itself. It may be a bit cute to put it this way, but there are indisputably two versions of this show, and they don’t always work together. On one hand, there’s the office satire, the dystopian corporate culture parody that serves as the show’s entry point. This version of Severance is fine as far as it goes, but it’s also a little bit repetitive, and occasionally a little bit stale. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999) and Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office (2001) set the terms for almost every contemporary office satire since. Severance shares their main features, with corporate drone office workers in nondescript cubicles overseen by mediocre middle managers on power trips, and with disingenuous, limply conceived efforts at promoting corporate “culture.”
After the brief, public revolt of the Innies last season, the culture is now a bit different at Lumon. In the world of the show, severance is a controversial procedure, and so, after Helly surfaces briefly to tell the world about the exploitative conditions at Lumon, the fictional company reacts much the same way that a real-life one would: by offering superficial change. The Innies are shown a hilarious stop-motion animated video made by the company that retcons their revolt into a teachable moment; employees are now given access to “Hall Passes” that allow them to roam freely throughout the workplace; the psychological torture chamber that used to be called the “Break Room” has been redesigned as a cozy cell in which Innies are able to briefly meet the families of their Outies. The changes make no material difference to the well-being of the Innies, but they offer a narrative of growth and healthy corporate governance. This plotline bears quite a stark relation to the cynicism of corporate DEI efforts post–Black Lives Matter and the hollowness of workplace reforms in the wake of the pandemic. The company co-opts the revolution to continue business as usual.
It’s not that the critiques of office culture we see in Severance are wrong; it’s just that they are pretty predictable. The show endeavors to package these critiques, to trot out these tropes, in as winking a manner as possible—which only really serves to remind us of how pro forma this aspect of the show is. For all of its clever fillips around the conventions, this half of Severance is a fairly straightforward genre exercise.
The other, more absorbing side of the show has never really been about office culture. This other Severance is primarily a mystery box. One might argue that mystery box shows have been even more ubiquitous, more formulaic, more annoyingly self-satisfied as a genre than office satires this century. But the mystery elements of Severance are impressively unpredictable: There’s the question of the dark hallway that Irving’s Outie compulsively paints and sketches. There’s the question of who exactly Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) really is. There’s the question of why the company wants its departments at odds with one another. There’s the question of whether and why Mark’s dead wife has been resurrected as a Lumon employee on the severed floor. There’s the question of what any of their work is actually for. And there’s the question, perhaps most importantly, of the cute little baby goats that live inexplicably in an office down the hall.
This season, the sense of mystery deepens and expands. I can’t get enough of the lore about the company’s enigmatic founder, Kier Eagan, and while the show giddily draws on the histories of Mormonism and Scientology in crafting this founder’s narrative, there’s originality in the writing, including a particularly memorable new story about the harms of self-pleasure in the great outdoors. The new season digs into each of the aforementioned puzzles, while paying substantially more attention to the importance of the work the Innies are doing and demonstrating the lengths to which Lumon’s corporate overlords will go to see it completed. The show begins to explore the terrifying and tantalizing possibility of double agents, non-severed employees masquerading as severed ones. And, just as it did last season, Severance introduces several different visual mysteries—vistas that can’t seem to exist; uncanny apparitions—which add to both the mood and the narrative mystery of the show.
Every one of the mysteries in Severance, however, has a logical explanation: Lumon has simply created a system of myths, legends, and office regulations to mask the grubby process of exploitation and extraction that is the company’s business. Lost, the modern archetype of the mystery box, also featured an elaborate infrastructure of corporate hooey designed to distract people from the fact that they had become lab animals. But Lost also, eventually, imbued all of this with transcendent spiritual meaning. The severed floor is not the Lost island. The Innies are all in a corporate escape room. It’s fun, and the mysteries feel larger than life, but when it’s over, they don’t enter a new plane of existence. They’re still just at the strip mall.
That is not to say that Severance doesn’t circle around big questions. A common reading, and one that’s obviously correct, is that Severance is about grief and grieving. Severance, the technique, is Mark’s attempt to short-circuit the grieving process, to distract himself, to create a self who’s never lost anything, who wouldn’t even know what that would feel like. But the show’s second season feels more obsessed than before about the idea of severance as a kind of death itself. The severed floor is somehow, all at once, a way to avoid thinking about death, a way of very directly thinking about death, and a technological advance that makes possible a new way of dying: The Innies have no connection to their outside lives or loved ones, but they also have new, severed lives that are precious and precarious themselves.
Death is on the characters’ minds this season, too. They hold a funeral for a retired colleague, they almost commit a murder, and they come up against the reality and mystery of death itself. On their team-building excursion, they see a dead animal. One Innie asks, “Why does it look so messed up?” Another Innie replies, “Maybe this is what dead things look like.” Mark’s wife dies on the outside but reappears on the inside; a few characters “die” on the inside only to live on the outside. In endeavoring to understand how this is possible, Mark and company run around their office building asking anyone who’ll listen, What happens after you die? Where did my loved ones go? What does death even mean?
There are things happening in Severance that are conventional office satire; there are moments of jarringly deep existential wonderment; and there are big clumps of random, silly nonsense. These three modes don’t always hang together, but there is something daring about the attempt. For all its fun house distractions, Severance is not particularly subtle about its blunt fascination with death; everything in the show—from the “Music Dance Experience” on the inside to dinner parties with friends on the outside—serves only as temporary distraction from this fundamental, irresolvable mystery. It is occasionally frustrating to watch a show entirely constructed out of fake backdrops, layers of cartoony constructedness. But it can also be exhilarating in the brief moments when all those layers drop away, leaving the characters, and us along with them, in free fall.
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