Sign Up for Severance

I think many TV viewers out there are only subscribing to Apple TV+ when there are new episodes of Ted Lasso (if even then), so I'm hauling out the decorations to throw a party for another series on the streaming service that you really should be watching: Severance.

Severance posits a world in which you can have your brain "severed" into two: your work self and your personal self. Ride the elevator up from the corporate basement where you work, and you forget absolutely everything about what it is you do there. Ride it down the next morning, and you work completely free of distractions of your forgotten life outside. It's an arrangement perfect for maintaining a separation between work and home, say its proponents -- and "Mark S" is eager to forget parts of his life. But new hire "Helly R" reveals the dark torture of signing up for severance: she wants to leave the unending hell that is her job, but there is no escape.

It's hard to categorize just what Severance is. The Office mashed up with Westworld? Being John Malkovich: The TV Series? There are a lot of touchstones informing what it is, even as it's something unique. It is, for certain, delightfully and aggressively weird. Characters definitely have desires and emotions... yet they often feel "muted" or constrained (even outside work, in the real world). The day-to-day business of Lumon, the corporation at the heart of the story, is unknowable, but this feels like part of a deliberate strategy to satirize corporate behavior and not writers presenting a "puzzle box" to which even they don't know the answers.

One thing that's crystal clear: the acting is exceptional. Adam Scott stars as Mark, and he takes to the drama here as brilliantly as he's played any comedic role in his career. The range of well known actors in the cast is positively anarchic, including Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken. Fans of sci-fi television will probably recognize Dichen Lachman (from either Dollhouse or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). But even the faces new to me are not at all being outshone by the rest: Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, and Zach Cherry are all absolutely vital to the story, and there's not a weak link to be found.

The style of the show is omnipresent, probably in large part thanks to the fact that only two different directors worked on its nine episodes: Aoife McArdle and Ben Stiller. (Yes, that Ben Stiller. People best known for comedy playing it straight is an undercurrent for the series.) Office life feels lifeless, vast and stifling. Real life somehow feels just as bizarre in its own way. But no matter how odd the characters behave, everything seems to make sense in the whole.

As obtuse as Severance can be, I never doubted that the story was headed somewhere, never suspected it was all just weirdness for the sake of weirdness. And boy, was that true. The first season isn't just heading toward a thematic reckoning, it has a lot of plot revelations along the way. And the season finale (written by series creator Dan Erickson) is one of the most brilliant cliffhangers in the last decade of television -- an extremely suspenseful hour in which the tension just keeps ratcheting up and up and up. Thankfully, we are getting a second season of the show... but also I feel like I've got maybe three chapters left to read in a really good book. I'm eager to see if the writers can pull off a continuation of the story that doesn't feel like stretching the taffy.

I have no doubt that many would find the tone of Severance to be quite off-putting -- and I'm not going to tell you that "you have to stick with it." But if the first episode does grab you as thoroughly as it did me, you'll eagerly devour them all. For me, the first season of Severance gets an enthusiastic A.