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.
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