lodibet What Is ‘Severance’ About?

“Severance,” the Apple TV+ serial about a corporation whose employees have agreed to “sever” their workaday minds from their normal streams of consciousness, remembering nothing of office life at home and vice versa, is a show designed to break my heart.

It’s a serial in the tradition of “Lost” or the first season of “True Detective,” or “The X-Files” farther back — an unspooling mystery with science fiction and perhaps supernatural elements, thick with clues that point toward a larger conspiracy or mythology in which the characters find themselves caught up. Some forms of fandom leave me cold (I don’t care about the Easter eggs at the end of the umpteenth Marvel movie, sorry), but when I fall for this kind of “puzzle box” show I fall hard — with the knowledge, hard-earned, that the nature of these shows is to overpromise and then disappoint when the time finally comes to pull the curtain back.

Maybe “Severance” will be the exception; maybe the baby goats and dead seals popping up in the weirder corners of its office dystopia aren’t just like the polar bear on “Lost,” the symbol of a show whose pleased-with-itself mystifications ran ahead of any fundamental plan.

But rather than rehash my issues with the puzzle-box model (which I last discussed when writing about “Yellowjackets,” a show that’s sadly lost my attention), I thought I’d try to talk about what “Severance” is doing right now,pogo88 official without regard to its potential endgame, by offering three possible answers to the question, What is this show actually about?

The simplest answer is that it’s a show about the American way of work, with the severing procedure a savage twist on work-life balance issues, a sci-fi literalization of the idea of specific work identities (and distinct “work friends” and “work spouses”) as features of the modern office. And it’s about work in a way that’s especially resonant in a post-pandemic landscape where people have been taken out of the office for an extended period and find themselves returning — or considering a return, or being forced into a return — in a cultural context where the basic strangeness of office life has been thrown into relief.

no deposit casino real money

When this aspect of the show is most effective, “Severance” plays as a surreal companion piece to “The Office,” with Jim-Pam-Dwight sitcom dynamics transferred to a much weirder plane. Here office tchotchkes and departmental rivalries take on supernatural freight and corporate is a mysterious and baleful power rather than a hapless bunch of suits. When it doesn’t work as well, it’s because the show slips backward from surrealism into a more banal kind of corporate satire. “Severance” depends on the deep weirdness of Lumon Industries, its peculiar rituals and hierarchies and internal corporate language, to weave dread into the familiar landscape of computers and cubicles and wall-to-wall carpeting.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

More bleak headlines follow: “Bidenomics FAILED.” “Bidenomics is a RECORD FAILURE.” “Americans’ incomes down THREE STRAIGHT YEARS.” “Unemployment RISING.” “America may soon be in a RECESSION.”

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.lodibet