The wait is over. After nearly three years, Apple TV’s Severance has returned to grace (or depending on who you ask, curse) our screens. Safreen AC discusses the first season of the show and what viewers can expect from its sophomore season.
Apple TV’s hit show Severance follows a group of workers living in a dystopian reality who have decided to undergo a procedure called “severance,” that separates — or severs — their consciousness into two parts, one for their work life, and the other for their home life. The protagonist we are first introduced to is Mark Scout, or in work known as Mark S, played by Adam Scott. He appears to be employed in a low-level, monotonous corporate job at Lumon Industries that involves staring at a screen and small-talk with co-workers. The office is an outdated version of the classic corporate environment—fluorescent lighting, labyrinthic hallways, computer cubicles—but the similarities end there. The environment that Mark’s work consciousness, or “innie”, spends his entire existence in is absurdly feverish and off-putting from the start.
Mark’s office is strangely empty and has only one four-person cubicle. The rituals of corporate culture are rendered entirely robotic; when Mark gets a promotion, he is offered “a handshake upon request”, and when the team performs well over the quarter, they’re offered strange rewards like a “music dance experience,” a “waffle party”, or deviled eggs. Mark and his colleagues—Helly, Dylan, and Irving—work in the macrodata-refinement (MDR) department; it is unclear what they actually do, but it looks mundane and repetitive. Overseeing all of this are Ms. Cobel, the manager of the severed floor, and Mr. Milchik, the employee supervisor who emulates the all too familiar self-seeking, corporate-speak fluent, boot-licking affectation of middle-management.
Meanwhile, in the outside world, Mark’s outie is dealing (badly) with the grief of losing his wife, and finds himself half-heartedly defending the severance procedure to those around him. As the show progresses, Mark and coworkers start to ask questions and the carefully constructed world of Lumon Industries begins to unravel.
Severance falls into a broad sub-genre of stories that offer critical perspectives on capitalism, neoliberalism, and individualistic, self-optimizing work culture. The details of the show’s temporality and setting are intentionally opaque, but the world of Lumon Industries and the conditions that make its abuse and exploitation of workers possible exist in the present. Severance is billed as the ultimate solution to the work-life balance conundrum. Can’t catch a break from work because of the pressure to perform? No need to worry, all you need to do is undergo an invasive procedure to split your neural pathways into two and you can be at work forever! Severance is, among other things, a story of alienated labour. In some ways, it is the ultimate solution to the woes of the modern workplace; not only does it enable a person to become the ultimate self-optimised individual worker, it also allows them to leave work at the office, instead of bringing it home.
One of the show’s best qualities in its first season was the refusal to coddle viewers with over-explanation, a rare thing to see on TV these days, and so far, it avoids the impulse to spoon-feed the audience answers.
However, the show makes it increasingly clear that severance does not change the actual conditions that generate the precarity and disillusionment that the characters experience. If anything, it enables further exploitation by rendering any discussion of the workplace near impossible. The severed workers are not only heavily surveilled and separated from the outside world, but also split into small departments that are kept away from each other in a maze of offices. The discovery of a map of the severed floor is part of what propels “Innie Mark” to question what it means for his entire existence to be limited to the walls of his office.
The end of season one left the show with many avenues to explore and thankfully, the show has picked up right where it left off, dealing with the immediate consequences of the Innie protagonists’ actions. One of the show’s best qualities in its first season was the refusal to coddle viewers with over-explanation, a rare thing to see on TV these days, and so far, it avoids the impulse to spoon-feed the audience answers. It remains equal parts unnerving and absurd, and expands on the strangeness of the environment we were introduced to in the first season.
If Severance has any flaws, a particularly striking one is the irony of a show about the dangers of capitalism airing on a streaming service run by tech giant Apple. Not a unique flaw considering the present state of the industry, but one that nonetheless creates a sense of dissonance. Is it a case of an oppressive structure subsuming all critique into itself? Or, is it a compromise that must be made in the face of an industry that becomes more precarious by the day? There’s no simple answer, but it does remind the audience that media cannot be isolated from its production conditions or taken at face value.
This major qualm aside for now, the series remains one of the more exciting ones airing currently, and season two promises to further complicate its critical lens by turning to questions of agency and identity in relation to modern life.