Are You Watching ‘Severance’? If Not, You Should Be

Are You Watching ‘Severance’? If Not, You Should Be
Image: Source: Apple TV via TMDB

It’s been a while since we’ve had a good bit of performance art for marketing, hasn’t it? You might’ve seen videos online from Grand Central Station in New York City featuring Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette and their Severance co-stars in a glass box while series director Ben Stiller watches on, taking photos like a proud father.

It’s a pretty apt bit of marketing too, watching these actors work out office jobs pretending like there’s no outside world. In case you’re unaware, Severance follows employees at a company known as Lumon who have undergone a procedure known as ‘Severance’, which splits their consciousness between working hours and home time. 

It means that the workers get to effectively skip their work days by transferring consciousness to their “Innies”, while Lumon gets workers who are unable to talk about or do anything but work. It’s a brilliant premise because at face value, it’s not hard to see why someone would get the procedure. 

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Britt Lower and Adam Scott in Severance. Source: Apple TV

Skipping work? Not as good as it sounds…

Take Mark Scout (or Mark S. as his Innie), the show’s lead played by Scott; he takes on a job at Lumon after his wife died in a car accident, with his rationale being that being severed means he can avoid his sadness by quite literally being someone else. 

Let’s face it: work can suck! We’ve all had days where we wake up with droopy eyelids, wishing that we could skip today and be back under the covers. The show’s creator Dan Erickson came up with the idea for Severance while working a “really bad office job”, thinking about what it’d be like if he could split his consciousness to skip the work day.

It turns out that would actually be a nightmare. Because there’s no contact with the greater world or their otherselves, the Severance procedure doesn’t actually benefit the employees. It mostly benefits the cult-like company of Lumon, who are able to make the Innies do whatever work they want, and treat them as poorly as they’d like. 

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Britt Lower as Helly R. in Severance. Source: Apple TV via TMDB

The horrific world of Lumon

The horror of it is embraced prominently through Helly R. (Britt Lower), a recently hired Innie joining the Macrodata Refinement team. She wakes up alone on a table, unable to recall her name or how she got there, before being told that she’s a Severed employee by Mark and their higher-ups, Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) and Ms. Cobel (Arquette).

Helly is soon expected to settle into her role as a refiner, an odd role that involves sitting at a computer and organising “scary numbers” (the show’s words, not mine) with unclear purpose. Then there’s all the other weird things going on: people being sent to the break room to be reprimanded, strange perks, the labyrinthine layout of the Severed floor, communication between departments being discouraged. It all makes you realise that ignorance of what’s going at work isn’t a blessing at all.

There’s also Mark’s “Outie”, who is increasingly confronted with the reality that Lumon is up to some seriously suspicious work. When Petey, his Innie’s former manager, shows up and begins pulling at some of the loose threads that have been bothering Mark, thinking about Lumon begins to take over both of his lives. 

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The Macrodata Refinement Team, played by Adam Scott, John Turturro, Britt Lower and Zach Cherry. Source: Apple TV

The anti-capitalist themes of Severance

Severance is part of a huge anti-capitalist media wave in the last few years, kicked off by Parasite winning Best Picture back in 2019. The show is specifically interested in lambasting work culture and highlighting its utter absurdity, as well as directly confronting us with the strange things we accept when we clock into work. 

The process of Severance is inherently dehumanising and alienates both the Innie from their true selves and the Outie from their labour. Most importantly, it’s only the workforce that are Severed – managers like Milchick and Cobel keep their consciousness undivided, allowing them to see the Innies as less than human, despite. 

Plus, there’s the supremely cultish vibe to Lumon that is oddly relatable to the way companies try to make their employees feel “like a family”. Lumon has it all; nine vague core principles, the deceased founder Kier Eagan telling employees “I love you” and meaningless rewards for hitting quota. Much like in real life, policies like this make the workers more skeptical of their company, not less.

The criticism of work culture being integrated into the main story is exactly why Severance is so effective. Thanks to brilliant direction by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, Lumon feels all-encompassing, completely in control of the narrative at all times – which is why it feels so satisfying to unravel the show’s mysteries alongside the Macrodata Refinement team as the workers unite against their employers.

Whatever you do, don’t sleep on Severance

However, it’s a show not enough people have seen! Part of that can be owed to its exclusivity to Apple TV+, and I understand that the idea of yet another subscription service may sound nauseating to you. But I can assure you, Severance is worth the hassle, especially given the fact that season 2 of the show is airing right now.

Only two episodes of the sophomore season are out right now, and it’s a perfect time to jump aboard the Severance train. Ironically, it’s a show that makes for great water-cooler chatter, and as more people start catching up, I can only imagine the theories are going to get even crazier. 

So I earnestly recommend Severance to you, a show that I can guarantee will have your undivided attention from the first episode. I have a feeling that season two is set to be one of the breakout pieces of television of 2025, and will change Severance’s status as an underappreciated gem to a widely-accepted masterpiece of the form. Get caught up now and experience one of the streaming events of the year!

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