Polygon Praises a Season of Severance as One of TV’s Best

In 2022, Apple was three years into its streaming experiment and still trying to find its footing. Aside from Ted Lasso, it had yet to release a breakout hit. Sci-fi series like For All Mankind and Foundation had fans, but they were not mainstream success stories.

Then Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller brought Severance to Apple TV. The series helped establish the streamer as a home for inventive sci-fi, while its anti-work themes struck a cultural nerve. Its first season remains the show’s best, even after a very good second season.

Severance is Apple’s best TV series

Both seasons of Severance are excellent, but Erickson’s nine-episode first season captures the despair of a “work-first” culture with particular force. Erickson worked in a door factory while writing early versions of the series. His story takes that attitude to an extreme, imagining a dystopian future where companies surgically split employees’ consciousness. Each worker has an “innie” who knows only work and an “outie” who has no idea what their job entails.

The series opens with Helly (Britt Lower) waking up on a table in one of Lumon’s main offices. Through the disembodied voice of fellow innie Mark Scout (Adam Scott), Helly and the audience learn what being a Lumon employee means for her: a lifetime of work with very little play. Helly rejects the life her outie has chosen and does everything she can to escape.

The line between personal life and work has grown increasingly blurred, a trend made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic also exposed how little consideration workers and their lives can receive when the priority is making the numbers go up. Helly resists that way of thinking and opposes almost everything her bosses at Lumon ask her to do.

Yet every attempt to escape leaves Helly trapped. She is forced back into the same narrow corridor because her outie wants her there. Though they share a body, Helly and her outie struggle for control. It resembles an argument with yourself over whether to get takeout, only with far more serious consequences.

A clear divide between work and pleasure has its appeal. Mark, for example, uses the severance program to escape his grief over the death of his wife years earlier. But the arrangement comes at a great cost. In pursuit of work-life balance, Lumon and the people who choose severance have condemned their inner selves to lives devoted to work, pursuing goals they neither understand nor chose.

The first season’s nine episodes explore the questions that follow. Who is real: the outie who agreed to the procedure or the innie condemned to a life of toil? Is there a true divide between them?

Helly’s acts of rebellion stir something in her fellow innies that the unsevered people in charge at Lumon cannot fully suppress. Even before Helly arrived, Mark, Irving (John Turturro), and Dylan (Zach Cherry) had a vague interest in their outer selves. Once Helly starts pointing out the imbalance between their lives, rebellions both large and small become almost inevitable.

The first season unfolds through shifting identities, false starts, red herrings, and untrustworthy narrators. It is disorienting by design, keeping viewers guessing about what is real and whom they can trust as it builds toward a cliffhanger finale.

The second season is just as tantalizing, but less cohesive. It spends more time with the outies and on Lumon’s inner workings, both compelling subjects, while some stories introduced in the first season fizzle out unsatisfyingly. Burt and Irving’s strange but sweet relationship is one example. Season 2 has high points and few lows, but it does not match the first season.

Source: Polygon