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15 January 2025

Why Severance is the series for our times

The second season of Dan Erickson’s drama is just as bewildering and magnificent as the first.

By Rachel Cooke

I came late to the first season of Severance, an Apple TV+ series created by Dan Erickson and directed mostly by the actor Ben Stiller, and it took a while to grab hold of me. Its pace and extreme commitment to itself – for all that people may liken it to Beckett and Kafka, to Orwell, Charlie Kaufman, and even The Office, it is absolutely its own thing – meant that for a long time I was never quite sure if I was bored or bewitched. But six episodes in, something happened. Now I wanted to know, desperately, what the hell was going on. When it ended – what a cliffhanger – the feeling was of having been robbed, which was apt, I guess. Severance’s principal subject is theft: of time and memory, of identity and humanity. Forgive the hyperbole, but it is the television show for our times, and all the more gut-wrenching for it.

Before we get to the second season, our three-year wait over, a recap. Severance is about a mysterious company, Lumen, some of whose employees have elected to be “severed”, a microchip inserted in their brains to bifurcate their consciousness between work and home. Their two selves – their “innie” and their “outie” – know of each other, but none of the details of his or her life. The working day is a blank for the outie – the chip activates in the office lift – while the innie has no idea if in the real world his or her outie is married or has children.

What does Lumen do? It’s as global as Google or (irony alert) Apple, but no one knows what its real business is, save for the manufacture of the severance chip. The characters we care about work in shadowy Macrodata Refinement (MDR), where they spend their time pointlessly staring at a screen looking for any numbers that look “scary”; when they do well, identifying these numbers, they’re rewarded with old-fashioned office perks like rubberised finger traps and waffle parties.

The MDR team comprises Mark (Adam Scott), Irving (John Turturro), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Helly (Britt Lower) – perfection, the lot of them – and at the end of the last series (spoiler alert), having grown increasingly aware of the bleakness of their situation (I’m summarising; it’s way more complex than this), they managed to beat the chip. Dylan flicked the control switch while the other three went out into the world to find out who they really are. This was shocking, especially for Helly, who turns out to be related to Kier Eagan, Lumen’s creepy L Ron Hubbard-like 19th-century founder; it seems she volunteered to be severed in a PR move aimed at the process’s naysayers. This mental jailbreak lasted for 39 minutes, and it made the four of them famous across the world as heroes, the faces of Severance Reform.

Season two picks up five months after this, and it is – again – bewildering. So many questions. Why does Helly, the unhappiest innie of them all, lie to the others about what she discovered of her outie? What’s going on with Mrs Cobel (Patricia Arquette), previously their sadistic boss? Why is Lumen so keen for its rebels to return to the office, and what “work” is it that they must finish? Above all, why does it take little less than a pineapple (Lumen’s mad on fruit-basket gifts) delivered by the ever-present manager Mr Milchick (Tramell Tillman) to persuade their outie selves not to quit?

On the page, all this doubtless sounds irritatingly high-concept. But believe me, it’s magnificent. If I liked Stiller the goof (oh, Zoolander), I love Stiller the auteur. How he takes his time. Every shot is arranged to look like a painting by Edward Hopper as designed by Steve Jobs. So much is going on: satire, mystery, a love story. Lumen is a stand-in for every bullying, grasping, nonsense-spouting corporation we have, reality’s dial twisted slightly, and sometimes more than slightly. But this comes with an awareness that the non-Lumen world is hardly any less crazy (Mark’s brother-in-law, for instance, is a preposterously stupid self-help guru). The show is one vast hall of mirrors, in the middle of which stands our Everyman, as played by Adam Scott, and he’s utterly marvellous, an arrow to the heart. Watch him, and ask yourself what you did today, and why.

Severance
Apple TV+

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[See also: Yukio Mishima’s lifelong death wish]

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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors