The two-episode premiere of Severance is now streaming on Apple TV+.
The COVID-19 pandemic shattered the often carefully crafted barriers between work and home life, with coworkers getting glimpses of each other’s residences, pets, and kids. As many companies struggle to figure out how they can put those divisions back in place by urging a return to the office, Apple TV+’s new science-fiction series Severance provides a chilling satire of just how far employers can go to exert control over their workers.
Writer Dan Erickson envisions a near future where employees working on sensitive projects are made to undergo the “severance” procedure, brain surgery that divides them into different people depending on where they are. Fusing plot elements from Black Mirror with the surreal atmosphere and tense mystery of Homecoming, the show’s first two episodes hint at the implications of this technology by focusing on a small group of workers for the powerful Lumon Corporation who are rattled when one of their cohorts is suddenly replaced.
Ben Stiller does a remarkable job as director, providing a particularly hellish spin on the mundanity of office life starting with the opening shot, where new hire Helly (Britt Lower) wakes up wearing prim office attire sprawled on a conference table as a disembodied voice on a speaker repeatedly asks “Who are you?” That voice is her new boss Mark (Adam Scott), trying to guide her through the disturbing and disorienting process of effectively being born into the office job that will be her entire life.
Over the course of the two-episode premiere, the show sparingly doles out details on how the severance procedure works and why anyone would undergo it while hinting at huge mysteries about what the bosses at Lumon are really up to. There are echoes of Loki and The Umbrella Academy’s Temps Commission in the mix of retro technology, brutalist architecture, and Kafkaesque absurdity. Workers are divided into outies, who get to live in the real world, and innies who do mysterious “macrodata refinement” work sorting seemingly random numbers. They’re trying to meet goals to receive rewards like finger traps and waffle parties, a blend of pointlessness and infantilization that cuts to the core of workplace incentive structures that aren’t based on cash.
Scott’s signature dorky straight man charm takes on a more somber quality in Severance. Mark agreed to undergo the procedure so he can spend eight hours a day avoiding the pain of losing his wife, but instead of healing, he predictably winds up even more broken. Outside the office, he drinks too much and picks petty fights. Inside he’s grief-stricken once again by the disappearance of his best buddy Petey (Yul Vazquez). “I’m sorry Mark. You guys were one of my favorite office friendships,” says his supervisor Milchick (Tramell Tillman), whose demeanor flashes between kindly and dangerous in a way reminiscent of an abusive psychiatric hospital orderly.
That comment anchors the split in tone of the show, which is in some ways as dramatic as the characters’ bisected personalities. Severance is a deeply unsettling thriller filled with long shots of the too-empty office and a creeping sense of dread about the secrets being kept there. But it also embraces the tropes of an office sitcom, particularly in the banter between the foul-mouthed Dylan (Zach Cherry), who worries the staffing change will mess with his team’s productivity, and Irving (John Turturro), an old timer who annoys his coworkers with quirky greetings and his insistence that they should be satisfied with meager rewards like a firm handshake and creamer for their coffee.
Their lines are sharply written comedy, but also provide a meta commentary on shows like The Office and Brooklyn Nine-Nine where characters have all of their most meaningful relationships in the workplace and hardly exist when off the clock. It’s a reckoning with the modern ambivalence to the idea of a company as a family, which inherently makes quitting a sort of betrayal. The Lumon employees are more like a family than most in that the innies didn’t choose to be there and can’t easily choose to leave. Severance shows just how hellish that reality is.
Every perk -- like a bizarre therapy regimen where an employee receives information about their outie that is either strangely generic or far too specific to be shared with an employer -- is used as a form of manipulation. Innies are meant to be comforted upon hiring by a recording from their outies saying that the procedure was done with their consent, but they have the feel of hostage videos. Even in their domain, the workers have precious little information or control, any attempt to step out of line being quickly crushed by Milchick or the unsettlingly folksy senior manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette).
Severance’s success will be determined by the payoff of its central mysteries, but the excellent cast, eerie visuals, and offputting score make every moment of the first two episodes feel worth the ride. If you were on the fence before, Severance will make the return to the office feel even more threatening.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/17ns4EI
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