Praise Kier: ‘Severance’ Is Back and It’s Still Great
In the modern labor economy, when every worker in every industry is being asked to do more with less, when getting a work text or Slack message at 9 p.m. doesn’t seem improbable, when the capriciousness of the powers that be seems to be growing at the same exponential rate as their bank accounts, and when other job possibilities can be so rare that employees seemingly have no choice but to stomach all that other stuff, it can feel at times as if our jobs have taken over our whole lives. Which makes it an uncomfortable time to be working, but also a perfect time for the long-awaited return of Apple TV’s Severance.
Severance, back next week after a three-year absence, does the thing to which great science fiction aspires, using futuristic technology and other exaggerated concepts to comment on the world we live in right now. The series takes place in and around Lumon, a mega-corporation run by the dynastic Eagan family that has developed a process to mentally sever employees’ work and home selves into two distinct entities: an “innie” at the office and an “outie” away from it. Over the course of the show’s exceptional first season, we watched the innie versions of Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Irving (John Turturro), and Dylan (Zach Cherry) struggle with the depressing half-life they’ve been given, where they never get to leave the office, or sleep, or even see what a sky looks like. And we saw that Outie Mark wasn’t necessarily getting the mental peace he had hoped for out of the deal, especially once Innie Mark’s colleague Petey showed up at his house, having attempted to reintegrate his two personalities. No, this technology does not exist in the world in which we live. But given how quickly every tech company is racing to re-create ideas that various sci-fi movies and shows have warned us against, would it surprise you to learn that some Silicon Valley mogul was watching Season One and taking notes?
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Over the course of that first season, the tension within and without Lumon built and built to a spectacular finale where the innies managed to briefly take over their outies’ bodies, in an attempt to tell the rest of the world about the nightmarish nature of their existence. That episode, “The We We Are,” was one of the most tense and thrilling episodes of dramatic television I’ve ever seen, ending on a pair of wicked cliffhangers: Innie Mark discovered that Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), the severed floor’s wellness counselor, was really Outie Mark’s wife, Gemma, whom the world thought was dead; and Helly learned that her outie is Helena Eagan, part of the cruel clan that rules Lumon. But between the high concept of the series and the extreme nature of the innies’ rebellion, it was fair to wonder if the series’ producing team — including creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller — could make it function for more than that one incredible season.
What a relief — and, even more, what a pleasure — it was to dive into the 10 episodes of Season Two and discover that Severance has still got it. There are some storytelling hiccups here and there (as there were, to be fair, in Season One), but for the most part the new season is as exciting, surprising, darkly funny, and distinct as before.
It’s been a very long three years since “The We We Are,” and while some details had slipped my my mind in the interim(*), it was remarkable how much of it still felt so vivid after so much time. It’s a credit to how good and specific the first season was, but also to how confidently Season Two hurls us right back into the deep end.
(*) Even the three-minute “Previously, on Severance” clip reel that precedes the first episode has to gloss over some things I had forgotten, notably Dr. Reghabi (played by Karen Aldridge), the scientist who attempted to reintegrate Petey, and who killed the head of Lumon security in front of Outie Mark. Look here on Jan. 16 (the morning before the official premiere date) for a refresher list of key character and plot points.
Without giving away too much about what happens next on a series where the surprises are a substantial part of the fun, the new episodes find an elegant and convincing way to get its characters out of all the corners they had seemingly been painted into when last we saw them. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the show eventually gets the four main characters back onto the severed floor, in part by leaning into the no-win scenario of severance: Being an innie is hell, but the alternative is oblivion. As Mr. Milchick, the cheerfully menacing supervisor played by Season One breakout Tramell Tillman, passive-aggressively puts it to Outie Mark, “I’d hate to reward [Innie Mark’s] courage with nonexistence.” Throughout the season, every rebellion Innie Mark attempts — looking for Ms. Casey, trying to find out what the Eagans are really doing, and more — keeps bumping up against the same question: Is there a version of success that doesn’t end with him ceasing to be? The life he has is awful, but it appears to be the only one available to him and the people he cares about. It’s a seemingly impossible knot to unravel, and the season generates a lot of satisfying and necessary tension out of it.
Erickson and the other writers push even harder into the cultlike nature of Lumon and the Eagans. It feels like an exaggerated version of contemporary corporate double talk about how your job is like your family, but not that exaggerated. Milchick and the rest of management are constantly hurling ridiculous euphemisms and outright lies at the innies, assuming the severance process has rendered them too naive and ignorant to recognize them as such.
But the premise of the show makes everything feel like an ever-so-slightly bigger and/or crazier version of our own reality. Material that could easily feel like a cliché on another series takes on new and deeper meaning here. One of the innies tells another, regarding their outie, “I don’t care who you are out there. I care who you are with me.” A version of this could be said in a traditional workplace drama, but the literalness of it here gives it much more heft, turning it into one of the key questions of the show: In late-stage capitalism, is who we are when we’re at work closer to our true self than who we are when we do everything else?
So many other moments and ideas feel off-kilter because of the altered reality in which they take place. Nothing looks or feels quite right, and everything is more intense than it should be, including winter weather so severe, the season at times verges on being a crossover with Fargo. Stiller, the other directors, and the production team continually do their best to make every sight and sound stand out, making Severance a bespoke product at a moment where most of the other great shows feel in some way made on an assembly line. As was the case last season, there are elements that evoke Lost, like hand-drawn maps and half-glimpsed pieces of mythology. To that, this season adds a few slightly off-format episodes, one offering the outies’ point of view on events we’ve previously seen with the innies, and individual spotlights on Gemma and Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), the loudest and most fervent believer in the cult of Kier Eagan. Yet even that feels less like Severance shamelessly copying a predecessor than it does the show finding new and clever ways to honor what’s by this point an old tradition(*).
(*) This includes being aware that shows like Lost conditioned some viewers to watch shows as if they are puzzles to be solved. Early in the new season, I began to wonder if there was a new mystery hiding in plain sight, and then began to worry that Severance would, like too many post-Lost shows, try to drag this idea out for the entire season, long past the point where every viewer had figured it out. Instead, a character on the show begins asking the same questions I had, not long after I started to have them, and the season definitively answers them well before things get tedious. Unlike Lumon management with its severed employees, Severance respects its audience’s intelligence.
The season finale once again takes various characters to a seeming point of no return, and in a way that plays smartly in conversation with events from the end of Season One. By this point, though, it’s time to stop questioning the ongoing viability of the concept. After the way the first season ended, this one has no business working at all, never mind this well. By now, Severance has earned the right to go in whatever wild, seemingly unsustainable direction its creative team wants. Hopefully, they got to see their families — or, at least, got to breathe in some fresh air and look at the sunshine — every now and then during the very long process of making this fantastic season.
Season Two of Severance debuts Jan. 17 on Apple TV+, with episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all 10 episodes.
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