With a new Apple TV series, Severance, writer Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller sketch a nightmare version of the future of labor that looks a little too close to work as we have it now. In its near-future, Adam Scott plays Mark, an employee at Lumon Industries who has undergone a medical procedure known as “severance.” This surgery split his mind such that while he’s at work in the company’s Macrodata Refinement division, he has no memory of his personal life. Likewise, as soon as he leaves the massive, grim headquarters, he loses all memories of his work self. He leads a dualistic existence, a twin inhabiting him that he’s unaware of. What would drive someone to do this? In Mark’s case, the death of his wife and his unrelenting grief.
Mark works in an open-office cubicle alongside two other severed employees: Irving (John Turturro), docile, fastidious, and a stickler for company policy, and Dylan (Zach Cherry), an uncouth but sharp schlub who enjoys corporate perks and prizes. When the show opens, a new member of their team, Helly (Britt Lower), has just undergone the procedure. She wakes up on a table in an empty boardroom, dazed and confused, and receives oral instructions over the intercom. Later, we see that the voice belongs to Mark, who observes from an adjacent room while also being watched in the process.
Surveillance makes for the major motif of the show. The Macrodata Refinement division’s behavior is videotaped by an un-severed boss, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who is also monitored: in her case, by a faceless board that conference-calls in but speaks to her only via an assistant wearing an earpiece. Cobel, in turn, sends her non-severed underling Milchick (Tramell Tillman) to discipline the employees. There are carrots as well as sticks, such as “wellness checks,” in which a robotic therapist, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), induces a kind of hypnosis in her seductive spa and reads them “facts” about the great life that they lead on the outside.
In reality, Mark’s external existence is drab and dreary. He lives alone in sterile company housing and almost never socializes. His only human contact comes from his sister Devon (Jen Tullock), married to self-help guru Ricken (Michael Chernus) and about to give birth to their first child. Neither is severed, and they regard Mark’s decision with both tacit support and considerable anxiety. He wants to be a nobody, a nonentity, to numb himself from the pain of existence. Though unsure of what he does at his day job, he believes it’s benign — so what’s the harm in not knowing?
One night, a mysterious man appears in his driveway who claims to be his former co-worker, Petey (Yul Vazquez). He’s undergone a clandestine process of “reintegration,” he tells Mark, a secret procedure to un-severe his mind and stitch himself back together. But just as he informs Mark about the nefarious treatment their “innies” receive, he suffers a mental and physical collapse. This only sends Mark further down the rabbit hole to discover the truth of what goes on at Lumon.
Severance is a mix of black comedy and psychological thriller, like The Twilight Zone meshed with Office Space. Erickson has no other credits to his name, so the imagination he displays with the script is all the more striking. He and Stiller borrow from many sources, including the dystopian sci-fi of P.D. James and Philip K. Dick. They build a meticulous world both inside and out of the Lumon walls, one you can’t quite place, with minimalist, geometric decor out of the 1970s and rudimentary computers from the ‘80s. Is this the future? America? Where exactly is the town? The creators peel things open like an onion as Mark and his team explore their environment.
The show’s style takes on surreal elements as it unfolds. At one point, Helly and Mark stumble upon an unknown department where a bearded man in a suit feeds a herd of baby goats. “They’re not ready!” he yells at them as they stare, baffled. “You can’t take them!” In another episode, Dylan receives a “waffle party,” in which, after consuming said waffles, he dons a Kier Eagan puppet head, climbs into bed, and is treated to an erotic dance from masked performers. Elements of BDSM and the occult blend together in their display, its purpose unclear.
It all builds to a propulsive season finale that truly stuns. The cast ground the series with fine-tuned performances. Most viewers know Scott from his bro-jerk takes in Parks and Recreation and The Good Place. Here he offers different sides of himself: buttoned-up niceness at work and depressive-melancholic at home. As a young widower who strives for privacy, his subtle shifts and halting approach as Mark’s “outie” draw you in. Cherry’s Dylan brings a punchy comic brio and a chummy quality that turns heroic. Lower has an air of high comedy about her, appropriate for a woman who, we learn, is a socialite. Turturro adopts a clipped, proper speech pattern for Irving that, along with his sweater vests, heightens the man’s exacting ways.
Irving develops a surreptitious relationship with Burt of O&D, and it’s unclear if the homoerotic overtones imply some partnership from their past or in the outside world. Christopher Walken plays Burt, and the two veteran performers, with their uncanny, relaxed ability to act in the moment, turn what could be pat encounters into something real. Arquette draws her Cobel character too broadly, unfortunately, and strays into hambone territory. But Tillman portrays Milchick with a mercurial, creepy performance that goes a long way to establish the show’s outre atmosphere.
Stiller’s best work as a director remains his 2013 remake of the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which also examines a corporate cog who tries to break out of his dead-end life. That picture was a fantasy, though, with a brightness that stands in stark contrast to the tone and mood of Severance. The series was filmed and released during the coronavirus pandemic, and it makes for a prescient observation of a time when the work-life balance collapsed for millions. The crisis has been epiphanic. Maybe, people now wonder, we don’t have to sell our time and energy to undemocratic, uncaring behemoths that dictate our movements, constrain our choices, and govern our habits with nearly unchecked authority. Maybe we don’t have to shut off our brains and endure the daily grind. Maybe this whole labor system is arbitrary and, at bottom, perverse. With their compulsive, mind-bending show, Stiller and company suggest there’s untapped potential in us all — and a better way to organize society.
Nick Coccoma is a Boston writer and critic who’s been published in New Politics, Critics at Large, and Full Stop. Follow him on Substack at the Similitude and @NickCoccoma.
