Severance Season 1
In November of 2019, The iPhone Company launched Steve Jobs Presents Apple TV Plus, The Apple TV Channel, a new addition to the fifty media streaming companies attempting to recreate the broadcast television landscape of the late 90s except worse because now you pay for every channel individually. The service didn’t get off to a stellar start, with its first wave of original shows getting a decidedly lukewarm reaction.
But lately that’s been changing; the streamer (apparently that’s what we’re calling them now) recently became the first streaming service to win an Oscar with Coda, and its more recent original productions have been better received by critics. Chief among those is Severance, a show that with the recent conclusion of its first season seems to have become this generation’s Twin Peaks in terms of pop culture engagement and status. Does it deserve the hype? Get your waffles and corporate-branded finger traps ready as we find out.
Set in either a dystopian present, the near future or an alternate past (it’s complicated), Severance is about a shady company that’s employing the titular medical procedure to bifurcate its employees’ minds, such that they retain no memories of their on-the-job experiences when they leave the office, and vice versa. The show mines this idea for all the existential horror it can by making the “innies” who work at Lumon and their “outie” personas effectively separate people: the innies don’t just not remember what their outie was doing after leaving the premises, they have zero memories at all of any life outside of the company, past or present. From their perspective, they never leave the office. Ever.
Lumon gets around the obvious consternation this causes via a program of cult-like corporate brainwashing, but the process meets its match in Helly R, the newly-hired addition to the Macrodata Refinement team. Rebelling immediately against her new surroundings, Helly causes an increasingly big headache for our protagonist Mark S, leader of the MDR team and the innie of Mark Scout, a man using his severed status to try and cope with the loss of his wife. Things get even more complicated when a coworker from the severed floor approaches Mark in the outside world and tells him that not all at Lumon is as it seems.
Talking about the plot of Severance is kind of hard because there’s a lot we still don’t know. When you’re making the first installment of a serialized story, there are two approaches you can take: make the first installment as self-contained as possible in case you don’t get the green light to make more, or go for broke on the assumption that a second part will be forthcoming. Severance takes the latter approach. Not only are none of the central mysteries resolved, there are–apparently–major components of its setting that have yet to be revealed to the viewer.
Over the course of the season it slowly becomes apparent that the show is taking place almost entirely in a company town owned and operated by Lumon. What the world outside that town looks like–or even if there is a world outside of it–hasn’t been shown. The first episode contains a strange conversation about food that seems to imply some kind of calamitous, or at least altered, state has befallen the world, but that topic is never addressed again so it’s difficult to know what to make of it.
And that’s on top of the more immediate plot mysteries the show raises, like what exactly is the purpose of the strange tasks the severed employees are doing? What’s the deal with the baby goats? What the fuck was up with the “waffle party” in that one episode? How about those laminated cards with the sick martial arts moves on them? Why is Lumon, you know, like that, in general?
Bitter experience has led me to not get overly invested in questions like this, as I’ve learned that most of the time the writers don’t actually know the answers either, and they’re probably not going to provide you with a solution that justifies the build up, assuming they provide any solution at all. That leaves the characters and their interactions to carry the show, and it’s here, not in its expansive repertoire of watercooler mysteries and maybe-twists that Severance really shines.
The potential “gimmick” of the show lies in the fact that there are essentially two versions of each of the main characters. But this is a potential that it actually doesn’t use–mostly for the sake of maintaining mystery, Mark is the only person who we see extensively in both his innie and outie forms, and he’s extremely similar in both modes. Amusingly, the one Lumon employee who’s most different outside of the office isn’t actually severed at all (because we’re different people at work, do you see).
Rather, the innies are treated as fully independent people with their own character arcs separate from their outside selves, and it’s the interactions between Mark and his three coworkers on the MDR team that really carries the show. Watching as the Lumon-pilled Irving B (played by John Turturro in what I think might be the best performance of his career) breaks free of his cultish indoctrination, or as the seemingly self-centered and uncaring Dylan G turns out to be an absolute real one, is far more fascinating than all the corporate mysteries. Anchoring the whole thing is Helly, whose story gets into the show’s most complex–and most gut-wrenching–emotional territory.
This excellent character writing is fortunate, because Severance has a few stumbles in the story department. Most notably, there’s a period of three or four episodes where the plot basically goes on pause. That’s not to say nothing happens–this is where some of the best character development happens–but it gets a little bit frustrating when the preceding episodes are so propulsive and fast-paced.
My biggest issue with the show, and one that’s unfortunately not likely to change going into future seasons, is a pretty severe tonal mismatch between some of its components. Sometimes Severance is operating as low-key social satire where the severance procedure is a technological development that’s causing strife and debate in a way that feels very realistic and grounded. At other times it goes into a near Twin Peaks level of absurdism, mostly when it comes to all the bizarre nonsense involved in Lumon’s corporate cult and the things it does to its employees on the hidden severed floor. These two vibes don’t always vibe together, especially when that mid-season story lull I mentioned earlier focuses much more heavily on the inside-Lumon stuff, to the point that when the show final resurfaces into the real world it feels like it’s shifted into a parallel dimension (which, I guess, might actually turn out to be the case).
It’s a testament to how strong everything else about Severance is that these flaws–the sort of thing I’ve dropped a book or a show over numerous times in the past–barely put a dent in my enjoyment of this first season. After a forty minute finale that feels like it’s over in five, I find myself wishing I could get severed until the next season comes out.