Severance returns to the office

On its surface, “corporate art” is comforting and accessible. It’s bright, friendly and visually simple, featuring flat cartoon vector people — with their bendy arms and odd proportions — who are jumping, dancing, reading or running. They’re always happy. Always.

This art is used in every HR manual, charity about-us page, Facebook help section and LinkedIn jobs application. It’s uniform, indistinct, impersonal and insincere. The more you see it, the more you start feeling unsettled.

Severance, the Apple TV+ sci-fi office thriller show from Ben Stiller, leans into that discomfort. The managers at Lumon Industries have perfectly clipped hair and overly broad smiles with flashy grins. Their white-wall offices are clean and organized, accented with single-color carpets. It’s a shiny corporate world with a perfectly polished surface — but peel it back, and you find a strange, dangerous place. It’s also ironic that Severance is an Apple TV+ show; that “squeeze” iPad commercial fits perfectly with the series’s horror aesthetic.

The show, whose first season was released in 2022, is named after its titular workplace procedure, by which employees working for the mysterious Lumon Industries can choose to be implanted with a chip that divides their memories and identities neatly between the office and home. The “outie” lives their everyday life with no recollection of what they do during their workday, but as soon as they step into Lumon’s elevator, their “innie” takes over, whose identity and memories are limited to the office walls. To the “innie,” the second they clock out, they’re clocking in again, and a new day begins; and the “outies” are incapable of taking their work stresses home with them.

It’s a neat sci-fi conceit and workplace-analogy, advertised in-world as the ultimate way to reclaim the work-life balance that companies destroyed. What could go wrong? In season one, the workers of the Macro-Data Refinement department gradually realize how little they know about their employer and how little control they have, and gradually try to change that, with the season ending on a cliff-hanger, as the “innies” temporarily take control of their bodies outside the office to tell the world how bad they are being treated. Oh, and they also learn a lot about themselves; such as that Helly is the “innie” of the company’s heir, Helena Eagan, and that Mark’s wife, Gemma, didn’t die in a car crash, and has been working for Lumon the whole time.

Despite the three-year wait, the show picks up right from where we left off, dealing with the consequences of their break-out; and if you haven’t seen the show since it came out, watch a long season one summary video, because you’ll be confused as hell otherwise (remember Petey? no?). With the second season, we get to see more behind-the-scenes of Lumon, and there are revelations, questions and twists aplenty. But, where the first season explored the mechanics of its premise, season two focuses more on how it affects the severed and the philosophical and emotional implications of their dual identities.

Are the “innies” different people from their “outies,” or part of them? Do they have equal agency, or does the “outie” have control? If your “innie” sleeps with someone, is it cheating on the outie’s spouse? What makes us who we are, and what shapes our personality? And what makes you want to undergo severance anyway? For Mark, it was to escape the misery of grief; for others, it was a second chance, a rebirth or something else entirely.

The show never gets bogged down in these questions, just as it doesn’t in its satire or lore — it works so well precisely by how little it tries to explain itself — but these questions both make the show richer and have plot implications going forward. Also, you genuinely care about the answers to these questions as they affect the main cast, all of whom you end up caring deeply about. It’s not just that Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, Britt Lower and John Turturro give wonderful performances; it’s that you can instantly tell whether they’re playing the “innie” or “outie,” with each having such distinct personalities. Also, though Patricia Arquette steps back this season, Tramell Tillman gets more screentime as Milchick, and he’s just as fantastic before. (I need to find out who made his leather jacket; it’s superb.)

Part of the charm of Severance too is that, despite its creepy menace, it’s not dry, straight-faced or stale. It uses its satirical conceit to amuse or unsettle, not preach, and it’s hard not to laugh at the awkward “get to meet each other” games, insincere efforts at improving the workplace, or forced efforts to show they’re an inclusion company. It’s a funny, absurd show; and though the office setting may be sterile and impersonal, it’s not shot that way, with the camera floating and flowing with a personality of its own.

In the opening scene of season two, there’s a long spinning faux-oner of a disoriented Mark running down seemingly endless, disorganized corridors, with Les McCann’s “Burnin’ Coal” playing in the background. The next episode, we get another long swirling shot as various “outies” enter the elevator; and the third episode ends in a match-cut masterpiece which is perhaps my favorite visual I’ve seen in a TV show.

I’ve only watched the first six episodes of the second season, so I can’t yet give a definite conclusion, and I will be disappointed if there isn’t a bit more plot progression in the final four episodes; but so far, this is just as good as the first, which was better than anything else on TV. Nothing else on the small screen looks this good, puts as much trust in its audience, and has this much creativity and imagination in the way it’s shot, and its premise. It’s closer to the work of Roy Andersson than Taylor Sheridan, and I mean that in the best way.

My only concern is that Stiller keeps adding more and more mystery, and “puzzle-box” shows live or die on the strength of their revelations; and there’s a lot to answer here. Why is there a room full of goats? What’s the story behind the elevator? Why is a small child working as a manager? What’s with the cult vibes around the company’s founders? What work are they actually doing? (Also, is the retrofuturistic style a mystery to be solved, or just a look that Stiller went for, that we buy into?)

The show is more focused on telling a gripping, emotional story than making some clue-filled puzzle box, but we do want answers to these questions, and I remain concerned about how they’ll land this. Every revelation so far has been satisfying, but one corny answer could doom it, and the strength of a show like this will depend on how well the whole thing ends (as Damon Lindelof found the hard way with Lost). But, for now, I’m loving it.