Severance review: Apple TV, Ben Stiller’s sci-fi show turns work into horror

Depending on your vantage point, the current state of employment — with more unions forming, or reconsiderations of the true cost of a job — It is either a Great Receipt or Great Revaluation. However, the moment between an epidemic exposing the way incidental workers feel about their jobs and the greater capitalistic logic that brought us here isn’t a It’s good time. It’s a divide that no show understands quite to the degree of Severance, Apple TV Plus’ new sci-fi series in which people forcibly divide their work selves from their personal selves. The show goes to some bleak places, but with each twist — of the show, or its philosophical knife — it’s also increasingly compelling.

The world-building foundation results in an Escher-like world in which being of two minds is more of a threat than ever: The first episode (aptly titled “Good News About Hell”) opens with a woman coming to in a windowless conference room for the mysterious Lumon company, unsure of where or even who she is. She is as bewildered as she is upset, and Ben Stiller — who directed the first two episodes, and a handful throughout the series — lets the show linger in the mundane terror of waking up to a work-life division. This is, after all, the first time she’s ever really woken up, at least with this consciousness.

It can also be a very attractive part of the international business world. Severance. Mark (Adam Scott), a widower, took the job opportunity to forget his sorrow over losing his wife. For eight hours each day, he can be completely different, without the burden of the grief, and free from the need to weep in the car. He gets to work for a salary, which is an added perk.

Helly lying on a conference room table, asleep, in the opening shot of Severance

But SeveranceIt is ultimately a thriller and deft, because of the fundamental way that the brain works. shouldn’tThis is what they were asked to do. At first it’s merely the “innies” (as they dub themselves) speculating on the lives of their “outies.” Their work is inscrutable, siloed off from the rest of the company; even they aren’t sure what they’re doing. Peggy Arquette, their boss (a shadowy board) listens through a speaker system. She says that they can give a congratulations handshake upon request.

These episodes gradually establish the rules for the office’s dry surreality and reveal the wider world outside of its walls. It is impossible to feel the office’s bland and stale atmosphere because the decor is so modern. And in Mark’s time as an outie, we see the world beyond the Lumon building as cold and gray, with well-meaning yuppies who have to read thinkpieces to know it wasn’t called World War I at the time.

This sounds like streaming TV, but it’s not. Severance’s unspooling of the peculiarities of the show’s world over its opening pair of episodes at least feels earned. They convincingly construct a society to allow for an option as controversial and can be fed the cruelty of their job. And as the mystery of the show slowly mounts, the pleasures of it do too — the cast alternating between droll and cheery; the methodical office politics twisted into something darker.

Patricia Arquette sitting at a desk in Severance

Mark and Hilly sitting across the conference table from each other

The office crew in Severance talking to their boss around their cublicles

John Turturro standing in an office in Severance

We don’t cover it elsewhere, but John Turturro is also there; he’s fantastic, as always.

In that way, the show feels like death by a thousand cuts as it gets at something depressingly real: There’s not just a divide between work and home lives, there’s a divide in how work interests and human interests can be so totally at odds with each other. We all deserve to be treated well at work, but given how folks are disincentivized to make a fuss (let alone be unemployed) it’s no surprise that the workforce means swallowing some bum deals.

And if people don’t have to consciously do it, what have they got to lose? No one understands this better than Helly (Britt Lower), the newest worker in the office who’s almost immediately put off by the “work first” attitude everyone employs. She immediately tries to quit and runs into trouble. Mark calmly tells her to ask three times for leave. This is just one of the many protocol in place to help innies. But when she goes to go through the stairs, the hallway that led to her exit from the first time she tried to get out leads to the same location. This bureaucratic control, while unsettling and not quite as chilling is the distance between herself and her outie isn’t nearly as alarming.

As Severance goes on, Helly and Mark’s attempts to better understand the corporation they work for — and the two different parts of themselves — leads to a maze of identities, science fiction, and real interrogation of work-life balance. “I have no choice?” the innie-Helly asks of Mark’s innie.

“Well every time you find yourself here it’s because you chose to come back,” Mark replies. It’s a chilling line, and one that hits harder in a period of Great Reconsideration of what the workforce is owed in a work-life balance. Is this what you want? Severance The point that she so beautifully and eloquently reaffirms is the fact that going to work requires us to divide ourselves.

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