I can’t remember the last time a show made me pause, take inventory of my life and surroundings, and ask myself, “Are you happy?” And while that may sound a bit bleak, it’s a marker of a great story, a great execution, and an important show, one that has the power to shift our perspective and steer us in a better direction.
Severance, on the surface, seems like The Office meets Twilight Zone: a series set in the not-too-distant future in which people have the option of being ‘separated’, a special procedure that allows them to separate their work selves from their work selves. its regular, creating a paradox where your “innie” and “outie” live separate lives and don’t really know each other. But beneath the office waffle parties, hidden rainbow lights in the ceiling, and jazz dance breaks, something much darker lurks.
Mark (Adam Scott) decides to separate after his wife’s death, apparently as a way to cope. We don’t really know why his other co-workers decide to cut themselves, but we start to infer that people who cut themselves are missing something and looking for a purpose. “He’s really been helping me,” the outie says of him at an early point. Many people in Mark’s life, and the viewer at home, struggle to figure out why anyone would want to be cut. And the more the show exposes the dystopian nature of the office space, including legalized torture (because no one outside of work would remember it, so there are no consequences) and the constant yearning for any semblance of the outside, the more it seems to be cut off. The worst of the world. Who the hell would want to do that?
Well I. If you had asked me in 2016 if I wanted to cut myself, I would have done so in a heartbeat. At that time, during a previous job, I was assaulted by a colleague. This began to bleed into my “normal” life and brought work home to me every day, to the point where it affected my mornings, nights, and weekends in such a way that I was looking for any kind of quick fix to relieve myself of my misery. Like the employees on the Lumon mowed floor, I was also frequently let down by my superiors who claimed to have my best interests in mind. The idea of keeping the two of them completely separate, of being able to go home and get a good night’s sleep because I didn’t remember the horrors that happened during my day at work… that sounds incredible, honestly. The concept of giving up your bodily autonomy in exchange for some manufactured version of freedom is, well, from an ethical point of view, terrible. But when you’re feeling miserable and desperate and need a way out, it doesn’t sound too bad.
At San Diego Comic-Con, I participated in a breakup experience where my innie was given a different name than mine, and I sat at those same sterile desks and scrolled through meaningless number lists to “find the numbers.” terrifying.” “I even used small Lumon coins to get pretzels from a vending machine and had a break from dancing ‘Defiant Jazz’.
I loved it, and I knew at that moment that the me of 2016 would have settled right away and maybe, like Irving (John Turturro) or Mrs. Casey (Dichen Lachman), dedicated to the company and workplace of a way that it almost seems comical or unnatural, because what else is there? I would have romanticized every dystopian detail of that place, even praising Lumon’s founder and CEO because, well, maybe he had the right idea after all. We all want to be Helly R. (Britt Lower), or at least we think we’d be like Helly R. We watch the show and think, “Yeah! Look at her being the only person on the entire floor who notices that something is very, very bad here.” But I think that, in my mission to cope, my innie would refuse to question anything. My innie would settle.
After briefly being transported back to one of the worst periods of my life while watching this show, I was forced to take a look at my own life. Is anyone in Severance truly happy? It doesn’t seem that way, even those who are not separated but are forced to live among the separated in a world that doesn’t make much sense. It’s when Mark, still grieving the death of his wife, gets drunk and rips up his picture in front of her date, to “prove” that he’s “over her.” For eight hours a day, from Monday to Friday, he doesn’t know that he has a wife. But when he gets home, reality hits him again. The separation process is a distraction, and a harmful one at that.
I watch Severance and think about my family, my relationships, my apartment, my job, my cats, my shitty car, my health, my age, my country, and I wonder if I’m happy. I am, I think. But I look at this world that Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller have so carefully created, I look at the way Devon (Jen Tullock) struggles to understand his brother Mark’s decision, I see how scared Alexa (Nikki M. James) was of him. at such a time. vulnerable moment, and even looking at the way Mrs. Selvig lives and dies for Lumon (to the point where she maintains a shrine to Kier in her living room), and wonders if something is missing.
Severance is now available on Apple TV Plus. For more on the series, check out our deep dive into the Severance finale where we answer some of your biggest questions about the show.
