These 17 Reasons Will Make You Binge-Watch "Severance"
Apple TV+ seems to be on a mission to garland itself with highly acclaimed but less flashy jewels of entertainment. CODA became the first movie by a streaming platform to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. This win led to a 25% surge in Apple TV+'s new subscribers.
If you are on the hunt for such hidden gems, you are in for a treat with Apple TV+'s Severance — a perfectly made series that will not only entertain you but make you ponder over the deeper meaning that the story holds.
Let me give you 17 reasons that shall convince you to put Severance on your binge-watch plate.
1.Although Apple TV+ doesn't follow the Netflix model of dumping the whole season at once, Severance, with all its episodes released and the finale just dropped, is ripe for a binge-watch over the weekend.
So nestle into your couch/bed, and enjoy approximately eight hours of entertainment.
2.Severance follows an office worker named Mark Scout and his colleagues who work for a biotech company called Lumon Industries. They have had chips implanted in their brains that divorces their personal and professional consciousnesses.
It chucks out their personal memories when they come to work and restores them and chucks out the workplace memories when they leave. The amnesia about either life is so potent that Mark can’t even describe his job to a woman he goes on a date with.
3.The show is mind as well as genre bending. Although the basic premise stands on science fiction, the show is a workplace comedy, social commentary, conspiracy mystery, and psychological thriller with twists that keep you on the edge.
The mystery of Lumon Industries, reasons behind doing severance, and what it is up to in the outside world drives much of the show.
4.It's totally unsurprising that the show has received immense critical acclaim with a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and an 83 out 100 on Metacritic, which translates to "universal acclaim." With such impeccable endorsements, you can't go wrong for your next binge-watch.
5.The central premise of the show was born out of a real desire. One day the showrunner, Dan Erickson, started dreaming of a way that would allow him to cut himself off from his work-related thoughts.
“I had a series of office jobs when I first moved to Los Angeles,” Erickson told a newspaper. “At one of them, I found myself wishing that I could jump ahead to the end of the day. I wanted to disassociate for the next eight hours. I thought, ‘That’s a messed up thing to wish for. We should want more time, not less.’”
6.The show boasts of a scintillating cast headed by Adam Scott, and includes Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, and John Turturro, to name a few. There's also Academy Award-winner Patricia Arquette in a sinister role.
7.Severance marks Christopher Walken's biggest role on the small screen. Walken had earlier starred in BBC's The Outlaws in 2021, but that show failed to garner much attention outside a niche audience.
So if you want to listen to contemporary Walken's menacing voice and look into his icy eyes, you couldn't have come to a better place.
8.A major strength of Severance is its sublime direction. It was mostly directed by comedy veteran Ben Stiller, who puts on a director’s hat only when he wants to dish out a madly enjoyable movie (Tropic Thunder, Zoolander) or prestige TV (Escape at Dannemora). Viewers and reviewers alike have given a big thumbs-up to Stiller for this show.
9.In the first few minutes of the show, we see the headquarters of Lumon Industries, where Adam works. This quirky building is not a set piece but the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex in New Jersey. The complex has a very interesting, cool design. It was dubbed as the most iconic building in New Jersey by Architectural Digest.
Ben Stiller shooting at Bell Labs in Holmdel.
10.After languishing for many years in obscurity, the screenplay of Severance landed on BloodList’s annual roster of the best unproduced screenplays. It was in 2017 that it caught Ben Stiller's attention, and it was greenlit by Apple TV+ in 2019, with Stiller as executive producer and director.
11.Ben Stiller first saw the pilot script in 2017, when it was sent to his production company as a writing sample. It stood out immediately to Stiller, and he felt that this needed to be made into a series.
Stiller told EW, "It was supposed to be a writing sample, but I read it and was like, 'This is great. Is anybody trying to make this?' It just immediately jumped off the page to me in terms of Dan's style and his tone, and I thought it was a great pilot."
12.Several highly acclaimed fantasy, sci-fi, and dystopian works inspired the screenplay. The oeuvre of Charlie Kaufman (especially Being John Malkovich), Brazil, The Truman Show, Office Space, The Matrix, and Samuel Beckett's famous absurdist play Waiting for Godot are some of them.
13.The show's cracking musical score makes the episodes even more peachy. Its composer, Theodore Shapiro, has scored many renowned and award-winning movies, like Spy, Bombshell, A Simple Favor, Last Christmas, and most recently The Eyes of Tammy Faye, for which Jessica Chastain won an Oscar.
14.Dichen Lachman's Ms. Casey is Lumon's wellness director and the only island of comfort for the "severed" employees in the Eldritch maze of corridors and cubicles. The nature of her work is symbolized by the presence of a tree in her office, the only non-human organism from the outside world that we see inside Lumon Industries.
15.When Ben Stiller first read the script, he called up Adam Scott immediately as he could think of no other person for the role of the protagonist Mark Scout. Scott deftly transitions between workplace and outside Mark, plus he brings all of his Parks and Recreation goofiness, good-natured handsomeness, affability, and charm to Lumon Industries.
16.At the heart of Severance is the oft-heard but rarely practiced concept of work-life balance. The severance procedure in the show serves to cement the work-life balance in place. The show focuses on both sides of the debate around work-life balance. What happens when your work-life ratio becomes rigid?
17.Seeing the overwhelming response to the show's first run of nine episodes, Apple TV+ has renewed it for a second season. So, there's more of those eerie, secretive, and fun episodes about to come.
“It’s really exciting to see the response from people who are loving the show — and the level of fan engagement,” Ben Stiller exulted. “It has been a long road bringing ‘Severance' to television. I first read Dan’s pilot over five years ago. It has always been a multi-season story, and I’m really happy we get to continue it. I’m grateful to our partners at Apple TV+ who have been behind it the whole way. Praise Keir!”
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