The dilemma of Severance – Washington Examiner

It was with some trepidation, then, that I sat down to watch the second outing of Severance, Apple TV+’s wonderfully strange saga of identity, memory, and the American workplace — think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets The Office. A 2022 Emmy nominee for both writing and Outstanding Drama Series, the show’s first season was the perfect late-pandemic treat: a sci-fi head-scratcher with much to say about the nation’s 9-to-5. Yet surely the show’s magic, a function in part of its improbable, ingenious hook, would peter out when made to charm another 10 episodes. Could creators Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller come up with enough fresh material to keep the fluorescent lights on?

Happily, they could. Premiering in mid-January with new installments each Friday, Severance’s latest iteration is unquestionably the winter’s appointment viewing, a beautifully executed encore that builds on the first season’s successes even as it raises the stakes. More than an intriguing concept, the series is an aesthetic and narrative powerhouse. No longer must viewers wonder what will seize The Crown’s or Succession’s place atop the television mountain. Apple’s eerie, ironic drama is easily the best show currently playing.

Severance’s starting place is, as ever, the terrifying surgical procedure for which the program is named. Each morning, coming to work at mysterious Lumon Industries, protagonist Mark Scout (Adam Scott) rides an elevator that triggers a chip in his head. Because his consciousness has been “severed,” he will remember nothing of his home life while on Lumon’s basement floor. Likewise, his office activities will remain an enigma when he departs — Lumon uses the cloying terms “Innie” and “Outie” to describe an employee’s two halves.

In the first season, Severance’s pursuit of this idea was often comic, a tone artfully juxtaposed with darker revelations about Innies’ lives. Yes, the show skewered scripted workplace fun, such as waffle parties, but it also made dawningly clear that Innies never slept, made love, saw the sun, or rested from their labors. Thus stripped of identity and meaning, employees’ office-bound halves were easy converts to the corporation’s cult-like ethos. Viewers will remember the goats, the hymns, and the socialist-realist art, as well as, more sweetly, the hunger with which Innie Mark devoured a samizdat copy of a hokey self-help book, The You You Are. When the office is all one has, one takes one’s spirituality where one can get it.

Were Lumon’s offenses limited to the merely odd, Severance might have served as a useful critique of capitalist mythmaking and the decline of the work-life balance. At the first season’s conclusion, however, came a discovery that both deepened an already present sense of menace and put in place the gears that would drive the second season’s plot. When audiences first met Mark, he was a widower who underwent severance to give some version of himself a respite from grief. The first season finale revealed that his wife is very much alive on Lumon’s basement floor. What’s more, Innie Mark has been interacting with her for years, unaware that the woman he knows as the company’s wellness counselor is his alternate self’s kidnapped and imprisoned spouse.

Writing for the New Yorker some weeks ago, critic Inkoo Kang lamented that the new season of Severance “loses itself in abstract ethical conundrums.” With all due respect, that is a terrible analysis. Among the second season’s concerns are some of the most pointed and poignant moral dilemmas ever faced on screen. What else should we expect given the novelty of Mark’s situation? A walking contradiction, our protagonist can hardly blink without betraying himself or someone he loves.

Take, for example, Innie Mark’s relationship with Helly (Britt Lower), a warm and spirited coworker who happens, on the outside, to be the daughter of Lumon’s deranged CEO. While Outie Mark wants nothing more than a reunion with his wife, his Innie knows that such an outcome would put an end to his own romantic hopes. Moreover, the two versions of Mark have no way to communicate with each other. The instant one is activated, the other recedes into the mists, not even a memory as much as a vaguely discomfiting source of obligation and guilt.

Other returning characters face similar crises. Granted a rare family visit on the severed floor, Mark’s colleague Dylan (Zach Cherry) begins an emotional affair with his other self’s wife. A fourth Lumon employee, Irving (John Turturro), spends much of the season tracking down his own work crush (Christopher Walken), despite the fact that he has no memories of the relationship while in Outie form.

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If all of this sounds too intricately conceived to work, know that the opposite is true. Accompanying Severance’s baroque internal logic is a striking narrative deftness on the part of Erickson and Stiller. Case in point: a late-season breakthrough whereby the two Marks finally discover how to talk to each other. The 10-minute sequence that follows will not be topped this year where drama, creativity, and sheer storytelling pizazz are concerned.

That, in the end, is Severance’s bargain. A high-concept, gonzo puzzler, the series demands attention to its rules and gives back curiosity and delight in abundance. Like most shows of its kind, it will surely lose itself one day in explanation, curtain calls, and “closure.” But not yet. For now, let’s enjoy the extraordinary ride.

Graham Hillard is an editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.