Severance could have gotten even creepier than that waffle party
Praise Kier for sparing us from the horrors of disembodied legs walking around the office
Aux News Severance
Everything in Severance is just a little bit off. In the Apple TV+ thriller, we’re introduced to the corporate cult of Lumon, where a team of employees led by Mark (Adam Scott) have had chips implanted in their brains that partition off their memories between their personal and professional lives.
It may seem like a simple way to ensure work-life balance (or escape from grief for eight hours a day, if you’re Mark), but the severed workers come to find out that Lumon has trapped them in a sinister conspiracy. Beyond the sci-fi intrigue of this premise, the show amps up the mystery with its deliberately distressing aesthetic, where a typical midcentury modern office takes on an ominous twist.
Each episode adds a new layer to the unsettling environment, whether it’s a trek through endless identical hallways that leads to a room full of baby goats or a sudden death by baseball bat. In the eighth episode, it’s revealed that the waffle party reward for strong end-of-quarter performance is more about roleplaying Lumon founder Kier Eagan in an Eyes Wide Shut-like ritual than it is about having breakfast for dinner.
In an interview with Culture Study, Severance creator Dan Erickson revealed that his original vision for the Lumon office was even more disconcerting.
“…when [director] Ben [Stiller] and I first started talking about the show, the original version of the script was much more Brazil,” he said. “It was much more heightened and strange, and at one point in the script I remember there was a pair of disembodied legs that runs by in the background and their characters are all like, ‘What the hell was that?’”
This is a show where John Turturro is constantly hallucinating black goo oozing out of his keyboard, so sure, that seems like something that would freak these characters out!
“If you can believe it, we took down the weirdness of the show,” Erickson continued. “Ben fell in love with the part of the show that was this weird human sadness of a person who would willingly do this to himself. Like what would make you want to experience less time on Earth? How bad would things have become?”
Severance is still plenty weird, and while the specificity of the world-building is definitely part of the appeal, the strength of the characters and the emphasis on human connection are what’s earned the show a devoted fanbase. The season finale will be available on Apple TV+ on April 8, and a second season was just announced.
69 Comments
Outside of Ted Lasso, best AppleTV+ show so far. And honestly, maybe better than the last season of Ted Lasso. The cast is just fantastic, and the show is so weird but also awfully familiar for any office worker.
I’d swap Mythic Quest for Ted Lasso , but otherwise agree completely.Why the hell isnt it being reviewed/recapped here??
AV Club no longer reviews good shows. No Bob’s Burgers, none of the Star Trek franchise. Recapping a show is such hard work and so expensive.
Honestly, do they do ANY recaps anymore?
Sarcasm, I suppose? In my estimation, “recapping” a show has to be as boring for the writer as it is for the readers. Which would be “hard work”, yeah.
Many years ago they admitted that TV recaps aren’t profitable, so they had to scale them way back. My theory is that some networks will pay a little for PR, or some shows just attract more readers (explaining the thorough CW coverage?). But yeah it’s INSANE to me that AV Club isn’t covering Severance or Winning Time, both pretty amazing shows with a lot to unpack.
i imagine there was a brief moment when people used to share articles on facebook, and facebook juked those numbers, that it APPEARED profitable.it’s still amazing that the economies of this website used to support dual game of thrones reviews.
there used to be literally hundreds of comments within an hour or two on GoT and TWD talkbacks pre-kinja
Oh, man, I so wanted to love Winning Time! It’s been so disappointing and frankly boring so far…though maybe it’ll pick up when Adrian Brody finally slicks his hair back and goes full Pat Riley. I dunno.Severance is the best show since Succession. It’s embarrassing they aren’t re-capping it.
is the J in Kinja pronounced as a D? because Kinja is Kinda dull, they take over awesome websites and sap the life out of them.
I see what you jid there.
Recapping a show and reviewing a show are two different things. If you want to read a recap go check out the latest “review” of Atlanta.
I miss A.A. Dowd. He did “reviews”,
I said recap because AV Club no longer do reviews, not like the good old days.
It’s clear they only do it if one of the writers happened to fanboi/gurl out of it in their own free time. I’m wondering if they even get paid for the bare recaps they do do.
Oh, right, I knew I was forgetting a show. Mythic Quest season 2 was probably better than Ted Lasso too.
It’s a show with great cast, a great world to discuss, and a lot of mystery. It’s a sin this site doesn’t cover it. But I can’t name a single show it does. Best as I can tell, this site exists just to fill two thirds of your screen with ads and auto play video. Not to give any actual content that requires thought and provokes thought
I would assume networks pay the A/V Club to do the recaps. I seriously doubt Apple would give any money to anyone who has ties to iPhone-gate.
“For All Mankind” and “Servant” are also really great.
“For All Mankind” had a good, but not great first season. Still need to watch Season 2, which is apparently even better.
It is. Seems like the next season will continue that trend, as well. Makes sense, really. The further along through the decades they get, the more deviations from our own history begin to build upon one another. I’m really curious about where it’s all leading. I think more people would watch it if they hyped up the “From the creator of Battlestar Galactica” of it all in the advertising. Or even just advertised it, in general.
That’s hilarious. Apple+ advertise their shows! I’m laughing already!
Season two is really good—except for one, stupendously ill-conceived subplot.
Cool. I’ll skip that part.
I really liked Servant, but it’s a bit… much. Plus, the whole dead baby thing just doesn’t make me rush to watch the eps on release day.
I really enjoyed “Physical” and so far “WeCrashed” has been really strong too.
I’d go Severance > Mythic Quest > Ted Lasso, with Severance easily being the most entertaining and Ted Lasso easily being the least.
I really like Dickinson, partly because it is super-weird. Though not as weird as this show. Which I also dig
I’ve wanted to love this. The cast is doing good work, the direction is strong, and the production design is incredible. But god, so much wheel-spinning in the first half of the season. I wish this had been a really great hour-45 movie instead
I am starting to feel the same. Started out interesting, but I’m afraid it’s getting to be a one trick pony, a good premise, but it is just getting stretched out.Now there is a season 2, this is the type of show that would benefit from saying “x amount of episodes and done.”
I’ve liked it as a slow burn
Fair but glad I stuck with it, imho by far the best show on tv.
Best show not on HBO would be my qualifier.
I really enjoyed the show, for the most part, but now that there’s just one episode left, I don’t think they’ll be able to bring everything to a satisfying conclusion in just one episode.I feel like the show plateaued a few episodes ago and has been kind of coasting. Important developments have been dropped and a lot of the “weirdness” seems to have just been pointless feints just to make things weird for weirdness’ sake.I also think the show would be a lot stronger without the whole Keir element. Lumon would be much more terrifying (and relatable) as a concept if it was just a sinister corporate behemoth, not a goofy cross between Scientology and Mormonism.
Good thing this show isn’t just one season.
Oh, fuck. Man, we need to embrace the “one and done” model for stuff like this.I felt the same way about “Yellowjackets.” Should have been one season. Dragging that shit out will only make it worse in the long term.
This show was planned to have an arc that went over numerous seasons. Go ahead and whine about more of a good thing though, oh miserable one.
To me though, it raises the question of what a season of TV “should” be. TV used to be specifically designed to be open-ended so you can tell as many stories as you can until the network cancels you.Nowadays, it feels like shows try to trick you into thinking you’re getting a movie that’s being stretched out to 8-13 episodes, and ensuing seasons will be the “sequels;” only to get to the first season finale and few, if any, of the stories get resolved. That’s incredibly frustrating to me – and to be fair, I’m not saying Severance’s season finale will end that way, but it feels like that’s the direction they’re headed.
Yeah. I’ve seen plenty of shows that would have made great limited series that didn’t have nearly enough juice in the tank to sustain multiple seasons.Why “Severance” had a pretty solid finale, a lot of the second half of the season was just wheel-spinning.Still think the premise might have lent itself better to a movie or, with more judicious editing, a single season.I’m still on board at the moment, though.
“I also think the show would be a lot stronger without the whole Keir element. Lumon would be much more terrifying (and relatable) as a concept if it was just a sinister corporate behemoth, not a goofy cross between Scientology and Mormonism.”I struggle with this as well. Love the show but not sure if this underlying goofiness is even necessary. It’s perhaps more sinister, isn’t it, if this is just the next evolution of bad corporate behavior? The notion that some kooky weirdo pseudo-religious cult types might find “severing” a good idea is like … ok, that tracks. But your run of the mill behemoth corporation deciding “hey, this is a good idea … work/life balance for real!” is really much more interesting … and terrifying.
Totally agree! The fact that it’s this weird cult kind of lets the show off the hook. “Oh, REAL mega companies would never do this, only creepy cults!”Maybe Apple mandated it! 🙂
I’d add that given the “innies” are basically children with no external frame of reference that the Keir stuff kind of works, since they would have no other belief system. I like that in their world, they’re so starved for any material, that Rickon’s The You You Are becomes a profound text for them.
Yeahhh, I’ve got to disagree with OP’s assessment. I’ve worked in two major corporations over the past couple of decades and the current one definitely has some cult-like elements. There are weird elements in the corp culture that date back to when in started in a garage, but mean nothing at all to most current employees. Like the cartoon figure and his “peculiar ways” that just happen to be the corporation’s list of mission goals. This little guy is on every piece of internal signage.One kind of funny of thing happened a couple of years during the 20th anniversary celebration: the company sent each station a full-size standee of the CEO, just so we could see what The Founder really looks like. (He’s shorter than I expected, a fact I confirmed in his bio.) After the commemoration was over, we had this very standee left over and no one knew what to do with it. It was just taking up space, but no one felt comfortable just throwing it away. It just kept getting moved from one area where it’d be out of the way until we needed the space, then moved again to the next space. I was eventually moved to another delivery station, so I only imagine that standee was silently tossed into the trash when no one was looking.The Kier “worship” is just an exaggeration of my experience up the river.
I’m pretty sure the Keir stuff is, like, ALL made up. Every single part of it. But that’s just a guess.
Whether it’s made up or not, legitimate belief in Keir goes up to at least Patricia Arquette’s level.
Sure, but hopefully that’s what we’re seeing in the second season – the stuff above her.
Also “legitimate belief” has a wide scope in a show where people’s minds can be hacked so firmly. There’s a chance their belief in Keir is unnatural.
We’ll see! Honestly, the Keir stuff (as does a lot of the extra “weirdness” about Lumon) kind of feels like a hat on a hat. Again, we’ll see….
Yeah, I’d just assumed they made up the pseudo-religious aspects of everything just to keep everyone under control, following the rules, and not questioning anything. I mean, you can get someone to do almost anything if you can point to a holy book or received wisdom of a venerated leader as a “reason”.
I’d like to see a single historical example of what you’re talking about!
My guess is that the Board is the consciousness of Kier and the other past CEOs, existing in some sort of limbo state. The purpose of the severance experiment is to somehow bring them back, or allow them to take over another person’s body.
This is my feeling as well. I was hooked at the beginning but at some point, I became less and less eager to watch the next episode. It just feels like it’s constantly bringing up questions, and because it’s being released weekly, it’s hard to keep track of all the questions that have been raised. I think there’s a really good movie in here that’s been stretched out to a season of Prestige TV.
I agree. I keep mentally rewriting the show to fit a two-hour movie timespan. So much you could cut and simplify and I think the basic premise would have made for a great film. As a show, it’s definitely been treading water and starting becoming less interesting/engaging at about the halfway point.
You’d be wrong
no
I wonder how much the original concept of the show remains that would have still allowed for something like that, as it suggests altered perception, which underpins some of the current theories.
I really thought Turturro and Walken were going to be a married couple as “outies”, although the logistics of NEVER having met downstairs would have been hard to comprehend. But Motorhead was a very cool twist.
*spoilers*
With the most recent episode, you knew EXACTLY how it was going to end, long before they got to that point, and the slow buildup to it, with him seeing her and inviting her to the party and going in for a hug was just TRAUMATIZING, since we know how the next episode begins…
I like the show, but I’m really waiting for the big reveal because the slow burn of this thing has not been a virtue, and I’m very concerned that they payoff will not be worth it. It somehow has been spinning its wheels for weeks yet it moved some plots along too fast, and it keeps introducing new wacky non-sequiturs in a way that feels like it’s trying to distract the audience away from how little plot there is.Hallie comes back after trying to commit suicide and I assumed that the next episode where she basically accepts her fate took place months afterward, but nope, the whole series seems to place within a month or so.Harmony, a Kier true believer, gets fired in last week’s episode but the authority structure on the show, and what is and isn’t allowed by “middle-management,” isn’t explained or even hinted at, so her actions being something the board might object to was a surprise in a way that felt unintentional. Her firing is totally unearned as a plot development.I got bored of the byzantine lore so fast it was like speeding though seasons 1 to 6 of Lost in the span of 4 episodes. Like with Lost, it refused to tell the viewer whether it’s a scifi show or a fantasy show, and can’t decide how much technobabble it wants to explain in detail, so however they land is going to annoy people no matter what. It’s all designed and dealt out in spooky ways for the benefit of the viewer, not the characters or the reality of the show.It’s so frustrating, but alas, the cast is incredible and it’s extremely well directed, so unless the finale is all my worst fears (and it may be), I’ll probably stick around for season 2. 🤷
So was the finale all your worst fears?
Not quite, but a little bit.About halfway though I knew it was going to end on four conveniently-synchronized cliffhangers, so I’m a little confused that people loved that part of it so much. It felt so artificial. I didn’t hate the episode, but I really didn’t like that part.What I did like about it was that, for the most part, it was laser-focused on the team’s mission, not about gonzo worldbuilding reveals, so it was hard to be disappointed that they didn’t explain anything about any of that while watching it.But after watching it, I was like: well, why did I ever care about the baby goats or the endless hallways or the mysterious board, then? Does the show even care about any of that?
The episode did have a few of those bits, and they were all stupid. Helly’s conversation with her creepy father felt like one more peel of the onion, revealing absolutely nothing but wanting you to think like we’re getting closer to the center of the mystery, just like Lost did all the time.Irving’s story was emotionally compelling but a bit confusing logistially. Like, it seemed like he abandoned the mission immediately, which is interesting from a character perspective, but the episode didn’t really make it seem like that’s what he was doing. We don’t see him start any aborted attempt to find someone other than Bert. And of course, the paintings, the trunk of new mysteries, etc, just added more questions to a series that still hasn’t answered any of them.
I liked Mark’s storyline more than the others, mainly because it had a lot of other characters in it (so it got to use more than one theme), but the accidental reveal to Harmony that he’s in overtime didn’t end up having any impact on the plot or characters. She doesn’t stop or even slow down Helly, it was assumed that Milchick would discover Dylan was in the control room eventually anyway, and it seems like the missing baby was a roundabout way to get Mark to see the photo of Miss Casey when there were any other number of ways to make that happen (I would have placed it in plain sight, myself, in the living room, having him notice it at the last minute).The one meaningful reveal they did have, which I really liked, was that Helly’s outie is motivated to prove that severance is a good thing. I don’t care that she’s an Egan as much as the show wants me to care, but her being part of the project did a really great job explaining why she came back to the office after waking up hanging by a cord in the elevator, and her conversation with Milchick in the stairwell in the pilot.
Ultimately, the cliffhanger means that more substantive lore reveals are yet to come, so my worst fears about it being Dharma Initiative all over again have not yet been realized or dashed, just delayed.I’ll watch the first episode or two of the next season to see the actual finale for this season (it’s been reported that the original plan was to end the season later in the plotline), then I’ll take it week to week.I just don’t have patience for another 9 hours of “what are the baby goats about.”
I struggled with alcoholism for a few years in my mid-twenties. When I saw the scene where John Turturro is told about his outie’s interests and he was enamoured by hearing about all these things that he apparently enjoys but will never experience himself. It brought me to tears because at that time I felt like I was only alive when I was at work because that was the only time I was sober. The idea of thinking about the things I enjoy but not getting to enjoy them literally brought me to tears as an alcoholic because it made me consider all the activities I once (and now do again) enjoy that I had been blocking out with my addiction.
It’s funny how comparable “a fond memory of my past self” was to that specific scene. I adore this show.
After the first few episodes I thought the show was just an allegory about addiction.
My whacked out theory on this show is that the company employees are the ones ‘regulating’ the Outies’ world, which is also a Lumen enterprise. Explains the map showing the houses and Optics 3-d printing everyday items. Also, when they have feelings about the code it’s them running into something about their Outies.I also think that the Outies have been severed in some way from the real world – maybe in that they were downloaded into a corporately-owned virtual environment and are now just all existing as code – due to some apocalyptic event in the real world. I’m sure there are holes in all of this but I’m just too lazy to analyze the theory any further.Also, there is no way Helly isn’t a Keir descendant of some sort. Her Outie was fully invested and sipping champagne in that last shot.
Like what would make you want to experience less time on Earth? How bad would things have become?Look around. I wish I could sever both selves.
You probably really don’t.
Once the posters below helped me to realize how abstract this series — a Prisoner without the trying-too-hard silliness — I started to appreciate it.As for the season itself, it was the slowest of slow builds … but that FINALE! Wow.
Yeah, this is what payoff looks like. Something Apple’s other major “slow burn” sci-fi show, Invasion, needs to learn.
Hey AVClub, why aren’t we getting regular posts on this show instead of the endless mindless stream of MCU, SNL, Walking Dead, etc shows?Also, one of the best shows currently out yet rare posts on this show? Makes no sense at all.
After watching the finale tonight, can be severed until season two is released?