The New Season of “Severance” Is All Work and No Play

The sci-fi series “Severance” styles itself as a tidy allegory for the misery of the modern office drone. Most of the employees on the “severed” floor of the secretive biotech firm Lumon have undergone a procedure that separates their work selves (the “innies”) from their at-home selves (the “outies”), so that the outies haven’t the slightest clue what the innies do all day, and vice versa. But the innies have no idea what they do all day, either; they spend their shifts grouping numbers into categories on a computer screen, to uncertain effect. (Could they be killing people? Maybe!) When the innies clock out, around five, their consciousness shuts down; their next memory is of the following morning, at the dawn of a new workday.

The Apple TV+ show, created by Dan Erickson and directed in large part by Ben Stiller, premièred in 2022, and its off-kilter satire of office inanities swiftly cemented its place in the Zeitgeist. (Marx’s theory of alienation has never been taken so literally.) Adam Scott’s Mark Scout—known as “Mark S.” at Lumon, where severed employees are so cut off from their nonworking selves that they seldom even learn their own surnames—gets to his desk through a maze of unsettlingly featureless, subterranean hallways. Mark’s outie is a former history professor who is so devastated by the sudden death of his wife that “every day feels like a year”; deleting half of his waking hours seems like the only bearable solution. His innie shares a vast, mostly empty office with three colleagues: the paternal old-timer Irving (John Turturro), the faux curmudgeon Dylan (Zach Cherry), and the alarmed newbie Helly (Britt Lower). Two years into the gig, Mark still isn’t sure how many other employees are stationed on their floor, though he does eventually discover that one room is occupied by a herd of goats. The culture at Lumon is not just cartoonishly discreet—it’s downright cultlike. When Mark asks one of his bosses, the unsevered Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette), what the century-old company does, she invokes its founder, Kier Eagan, screaming, “We serve Kier!” The rank and file recite a different Kier koan to one another: “Let not weakness live in your veins.” Beyond the HQ’s walls, the year and the region are also unclear, but the weather suggests the dead of winter.

Glum atmospherics can only get you so far. I’ll confess to being a “Severance” skeptic from the start: while others hailed the first season as original and timely in its anti-work ethos, I found it intolerably slow, and soon wrote it off as the latest puzzle-box show to overestimate both my investment and my patience (hello, “Westworld”). Its retrofuturistic setting and high-concept approach held a surface-level appeal, but the incessant twists simply led to more questions, and to a growing suspicion that the writers wouldn’t be able to tie it all together. I was never quite convinced by Mark as a character; his grief over the loss of his wife registers as a cheap plot device rather than as a meaningful wound, no matter how often “Severance” returns to the sight of him alone in his darkened, sparsely furnished home. And, despite the series’s rich thematic potential, its social commentary pales in comparison to sharper, more vivid critiques of capitalism’s excesses, from the nihilistic comedy series “Corporate” and the pitch-black caricature of “The Boys” to Boots Riley’s anarchically imaginative “Sorry to Bother You.” The Season 1 finale, in which the innies seize a brief opportunity to commandeer their outies’ bodies and blow the whistle on their employers, culminates in two startling revelations: that Mark’s wife is alive, and that Helly’s outie is the Lumon scion Helena Eagan, who severed herself as a P.R. stunt to demonstrate the safety of the procedure. But, after three years off, “Severance” ’s return inspired a TV critic’s version of the Sunday scaries. I dreaded having to sit on my couch watching Mark sit on his couch.

For better and for worse, Season 2 feels more cinematic than its predecessor. Bloomberg reported that its ten episodes cost upward of twenty million dollars apiece, which would make it one of the priciest TV shows ever produced. Based on the lavish visuals (and on the accounts of rewrites and reshoots), it’s a believable figure, though Stiller told my colleague Rachel Syme that “any numbers out there are totally inaccurate.” The result is expansive and aesthetically ambitious: the encroachment of the surreal reaches Lynchian proportions while new subplots take the ensemble—and the audience—farther and farther from the nondescript office they’ve known.

But, if the show’s canvas has grown broader, the characters themselves have been reduced to mere archetypes. Mark is roused from his Season 1 passivity through his anointment as the series’ chosen one, set up for action-based heroics that seem at odds with his prior status as a white-collar Everyman; the portentous assertions from on high that only he can complete a file prove unintentionally silly. His wife becomes the damsel to rescue, and the once spiky Helly, who surprised Mark’s innie with a kiss last season, falls into place as her wistful romantic rival. This sanding down robs the show of its human stakes, which are undercut further by a seeming inability to make its “deaths” and disappearances stick. Being fired from Lumon means the end of an innie’s life, and a resignation is tantamount to suicide—but “Severance” is, ironically, too softhearted to conclude almost any of the workers’ stories.

In the end, the series’ most persuasive character arc is one that’s more mundane, and thus more relatable. Season 2 reveals that Dylan’s outie is a family man in urgent need of a steady income who’d been unable to hold down a job until Lumon came along. His relationship with his wife, Gretchen (Merritt Wever)—clearly affectionate, but full of small disappointments—is at once understated and evocative. (His attempts to find other employment also capture the sometimes degrading absurdities of the job search, as when a hiring manager at a door manufacturer peppers him with such questions as “How old were you when you knew you loved doors?” and “If you could be any kind of door, what would it be?”) Yet the humor and texture that enliven his story line are frustratingly absent elsewhere.

The second season opens with Lumon’s efforts to lure Mark, Dylan, and their colleagues back to work, post-rebellion, with the promise of “kindness reforms”—meagre perks that might remind some viewers of their own companies’ paltry return-to-office incentives. But the writers now seem less interested in poking fun at real-life corporate culture than in mining the tension between innies and outies. Early in the series, Mark is approached by a former co-worker who has been “reintegrated”; though Helena insists to Helly that “I am a person, you are not,” it quickly becomes apparent that the divide isn’t as clean as Lumon had promised. The issue of what these two halves owe each other becomes the fulcrum of the new season—a dilemma that’s more intellectually stimulating than it is genuinely affecting.

On some level, every job requires renting out one’s body and brain; to do so for unknown purposes and with no memory of what’s occurred is a “Black Mirror”-esque extreme that sets the mind racing to explore all its dark and varied possibilities. The first season considered other use cases, including that of a slimy legislator who dispels his reluctant wife’s doubts about a third baby by severing her from the experience of childbirth. The incident implied that lawmakers were complicit in the development and deployment of Lumon’s technology, which is controversial among the general public. It was also horrific enough to be memorable. But the second season seems to pull back from such bleakness, losing itself in abstract ethical conundrums and rote emotional ones. It’s far from a dissection of work and life as we know them; the incisions are only skin deep. ♦