Séamas O'Reilly: Why I’m content to call Severance the best show of the year so far
Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan
As Severance’s second season nears its climax over the next two weeks, I’m content to call it the best show of the year so far. For those who don’t know, Severance returned to the alarmingly good but terminally hype-resistant streaming platform Apple+ in January, following a stellar first season in 2022.
Its premise is annoyingly great: in an undefined near-future time, the medical procedure of the show’s title allows you to ‘sever’ your home self from your work self, via a brain-chip that activates once you enter your place of employment. Following said procedure, your ‘Innie’ will know nothing of anything but work, while your ‘Outie’ will retain zero recall of what you do in your office all day. For employers, zero risk of confidential or proprietary information leaking to the outside world. For employees, the most perfect possible expression of that most coveted phenomenon: work-life balance. You enter the lift to your office at nine and, almost instantaneously, find that you’re exiting it at five.
If, at first glance, that sounds marginally appealing, you’ve entered the show’s reality without contending with the other, inevitable corollary to that experience; while Outies are getting all the benefits of work without the work, Innies experience a never-ending loop of nine-to-five workdays with no interruption, no variance, and no awareness or knowledge of the world outside. It is with their experience, to the show’s great credit, that Severance centres its focus, and in so doing creates one of the most gripping, distressing, and frequently hilarious, critiques of modern life of recent years.
Innies do not remember anything about themselves, their families, or even retain any background knowledge of pop culture or historical events. The exact business of Lumon, their shadowy employers, is opaque to both them and us, as is the nature of the work that severed employees are asked to do, represented in the show as befuddling exercises of isolating numbers on their computers and dragging and dropping them into on-screen boxes. Lumon’s ‘core principles’, however, are everywhere, and further backstory for their values and mission statements is peppered throughout the show’s runtime.
As a satire of what might be termed ‘office culture’, Severance is not exactly revolutionary. The deadening grind of deskbound life has been satirised by every workplace drama or comedy since the mousepad was invented, and one could assemble a decent mood board for the show’s themes by using snippets of everything from Dilbert and The Office to Brazil or even The Matrix. The show’s other main crutch, the pitch-perfect simulation of vapid company-speak, is a staple of so many films and shows throughout the years, that you’ll have heard similar strains of such bloodless patter in Robocop, SNL’s parodies of corporate ads, and roughly 70% of Black Mirror episodes.
Why the show works, then, is in its bravura dedication to taking these themes and extending them to bleak and horrifying extremes. Most of the show’s tension comes from the pleasingly simple conceit that we are often watching two versions of a character, neither of whom ‘know’ one another, while trying to uncover information about the other. It’s an ingeniously constructed mystery box that must be headache-inducing to write, but which has managed the rare feat of introducing new information, characters, and concepts across its run, all of which enhance its central premise and keep its stakes high without, well, disappearing up its own arse.
For me, personally, it’s the show’s dark comedy that most consistently delights. Since Innies are born into work and never leave, they’re blank as newborn babies, to whom the company’s core principles are preached as holy writ and believed, with cloying fervour, by their eternally trapped subjects. The show is bathed in Lumon’s preposterous ‘principles’, the same ludicrous, soft-focus ‘we’re a family’ posturing put out by real life corporations every day; from billion-dollar companies forced to be coy about the nature of their wealth and power, or even the nature of the work they do, full stop. In Severance, those who reject the company message are subjected to ritualised debasements from unsevered management, and chided by severed colleagues who want them to go along with the programme.
The real-world expressions of this same dissonance are everywhere around us; the insurance conglomerate whose branding is underage hurlers smiling in a field; the consultancy firm represented by saturated images of a happy couple expecting their first child; the bank whose avatar is a majestic black horse frolicking through a field.
Most obviously, this kind of insincere guff whitewashes the more unsavoury deeds these companies engage in every day. A search for ExxonMobil’s recent ads will, for example, present you with a nauseating carousel of trees and icebergs, two things I very much associate with the single biggest booster of climate change denial over the last century.
Often, however, these hurlers, horses, and happy couples are merely so abstract as to be baffling. And that bafflement, that abstraction, is the point: they have created sham realities so powerfully disconnected from common sense that we don’t even notice them anymore. It would, in fact, be unforgivably trite to point them out in parliament, on a comedy stage or, indeed, within a gently humorous but tentatively preachy newspaper column. So, instead, we funnel this disconnect we all feel, this demeaning of our critical faculties, into fiction, abstracting these disingenuous tropes just two degrees further toward absurdity so that we may win back licence to ridicule them from the safe, ironic distance from capital that this provides.
It is in this safe space that Severance thrives. It may lack the violent animus of John Carpenter’s They Live, or the political venom of Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You. It is, after all, produced by Apple, literally the world’s most valuable corporation, an irony one can almost feel on-screen. But on Lumon’s severed floor, they have created the perfect foil to interrogate an age-old dilemma: why are we asked, all day, to believe things no one does about the terrifying entities who run all our lives — and what if we actually did?
