Work is a nightmare for Adam Scott in Severance trailer
The new Apple TV Plus series is directed by Ben Stiller
Aux News Adam Scott
The full trailer for the new Apple TV+ series Severance is here. The show, directed by Ben Stiller and starring Adam Scott, is a workplace thriller about a company that thinks it’s solved the problem of work life balance—but something sinister lies beneath.
In the trailer, Scott’s character, Mark Scout, explains what “severance” is; the process does something to employees’ brains so that their work memories stay at work, and their personal life memories stay outside work. No one sits at their desk worrying about how they have to clean leaves out of the gutter, and no one lies awake at night worrying about a big report they have due the next day.
In the trailer, Mark is rocked when his coworker and friend is terminated from his job at Lumon Industries. The higher-ups say they can’t spill details on what went down thanks to non-disclosures, and Mark receives a promotion in the wake of his friend’s departure. When the man tracks him down outside work with warnings about what Lumon is really up to, Mark, thanks to severance, doesn’t remember him at all.
Severance will be nine episodes and it also stars Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Christopher Walken, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Dichen Lachman, Jen Tullock, Tramell Tillman, and Michael Chernus.
The series is written and created by Dan Erickson. Mark Friedman (The Forgotten), Chris Black (Star Trek: Enterprise), John Cameron, and Andrew Colville serve as executive producers alongside Erickson. Stiller and Jackie Cohn also executive producer, and Arquette and Scott serve as producers.
Stiller most recently directed Escape at Dannemora, which also starred Arquette. That series received seven Emmy nominations.
This is Scott’s first starring role in a show since his short-lived Fox sitcom Ghosted, which aired in 2017 and 2018. He also appeared in both seasons of Big Little Lies.
Severance will release two episodes on February 18, with weekly drops after that.
67 Comments
thought Britt Lower was Lena Heady the whole trailer woops! Gives me Homecoming vibes.
What if your kid is sick and daycare calls to have you come pick them up?
What if you do a training course outside of work? Or at work, then you change jobs?
No happy hours outside the floor? No out-of-state conferences? No team-building outings? This place suuuuuucks!
“Kid”? You’re single, baby. Sure makes workplace dalliances simpler!
(Implied – but to stave off replies: “single and unencumbered by kids”) I am aware singles can have kids (firsthand!)
“I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number. My only child is the cold, hard infant of profit”
I feel like this subthread is people trying to poke holes in the premise without realizing that these holes are the premise.
Particularly the “changing jobs” one. I get the feeling that whatever this company does, it makes sure you’re the right person for the job, or that becomes the least of your worries.
“We just filmed the whole thing in whatever vacant office we could find at Apple HQ. It cost 100 million dollars.”
“At first, our producers were like, ‘We don’t have a whole vacant floor we can use’, but 500 redundancies later and that problem was solved.”
This looks pretty good. I have a few months left on my apple tv+ trial.
I was really hoping this was going to be based on the Ling Ma novel.
Is this why Scott and Scott haven’t picked their Red Hot Chili Peppers podcast back up?
Wait, this isn’t about captain Herby pushing out all the AV Club 2.0 staffers? Could’ve sworn.. ¯(°_o)/¯
“The process didn’t work on O’Neal. Frankly, his brain chemistry is unlike anything we’ve seen before.”
It’s like The Office meets There Is No Antimemetics Division!
Speaking of work being a nightmare…
Well this fucking sucks. I one-million percent support them but, man. We, the actual readers, are fucked now. (Not as fucked as them though. G.d. bullshit.)
Looks like Rife was one of the seven who were forced out with this “offer”. Who else are we losing?
Dowd says he’s leaving*.*being forced out with this bullshit relocation stunt
That sucks. Rife and Dowd are great. G/O is not. Learn to treat your employees fairly, you fucks.
Well… damn… Where am I supposed to go now? I stuck it out around here a long time, but this does not sound like something I want to be a part of anymore.
I really need to figure out a way to put up some sort of “Are you sure?” blocker when I habitually check the AV Club. It’s a habit that dates back to the early 00s, and it’s definitely responsible for me sticking it out this long. This place used to be amazing. People were erudite but unpretentious, both staff and commentariat. I should’ve stopped reading 10 years ago, when Phipps left.
This is me exactly. I actually don’t know why I’m here.
I feel exactly the same.
Zombie AV Club has been a mess for years anyway. By all means make it worse.
I’m glad they’re not taking this shit, but man does this break my heart. I’ve loved being part of the Club for, what, maybe ten years? And now it’s being reduced to rubble.
Perkins lists them in his letter saying he is quitting his freelance gig with AVC in solidarity. Adams, Dowd, McLevy, Rife, Adamczyk, Ihnat & Chavez.
Oh, so all the remaining ones worth reading, then? Fantastic.
*frantically searches for “Barsanti” in that list*Fuck.
Perkins left in solidarity.
apparently A.A. Dowd for some fucking reason.
Don’t worry tho, Bersanti is locked in LOL.
LA is that much more expensive than Chicago? I had no idea.
But why isn’t work-from-home an option for a blogger? Seems like it’d be the ideal profession for working from home.
yet another reminder of the value of unions.
That letter nails something on the head that I thought about: I don’t read this site because of their access to celebs, and they don’t need it. If anything, I think most people appreciate the somewhat outsider-y footing/framing of the site, and making everyone move to LA just fucking eliminates that. So fucking dumb.
The interviews are always the articles I’m least likely to read, and when I do it’s usually ones with character actors or less mainstream creators. Access to Hollywood’s best and brightest is not the drawcard for the AV Club as far as I’m concerned.
Hopefully this includes barsanti and tenreyro though?
FUCK, dude.
Jesus Christ, there is no reason to have everyone in one city. They just want to lord over the remaining workers while forcing them to live in one of the most expensive cities in the nation.
One thing I find fascinating is that while this is happening, The Athletic was bought by the NY Times for $550 million!
Now, I have no illusions thst the AV Club would sell for anywhere near that much. But I wouldn’t be surprised if right now, after Spanfeller’s mismanagement, Great Hill would literally have to pay someone millions to take it off their hands.If they had simply hired a competent manager to run G/O properties like AV Club, The Onion, Deadspin, etc. like normal companies they would have had something they could sell for a hefty profit. Instead, they are stuck with something that is probably worth $600 million less than The Athletic, which if you do the math is quite a feat.One of the thing dummies like Spanfeller and Great Hill do is insist that their business model is sound and critics don’t understand anything about their 4D chess. But it’s blindingly obvious that they blew it, badly.They may have hoped to cut costs, hold on to a core readership, and find a sucker buyer. But they left such an incompetent rube in charge that they screwed up the basic playbook so badly they’re left with a Superfund site so stinky that nobody will buy it for a dollar.I’m guessing they have a fake valuation in the black that they’re hanging on to now, but sooner or later they’re stuck writing off to the tune of tens of millions, all because nobody at Great Hill had the common sense to see that Jim Spanfeller is a herb.
I’d have to look at a balance sheet to assess how they’ve really done, but I’m not so sure that things are all that bad… at least by management’s criteria.Certainly things have been disastrous from a G/O employee perspective. They’ve been treated poorly to the point that many of the good ones have been pushed out.From a reader perspective, we complain about it, but we keep coming back. Many have reported that the comment section is the main draw and have been making excuses for poor writing (oh, relax, it’s just a blog! No need to use correct syntax or cite sources or even generate original content) since long before the current management team took over. Some in this very comment thread have asserted that they’d leave if the comments section goes away.Management may realize that they’re running a discussion forum / message board more than a news reporting outlet and have adjusted accordingly. They likely saw a dramatic drop-off in traffic to Deadspin following the shut-down of comments over there and noted it for the other sites. They’ve driven out many of the good (expensive) writers and brought in some entry-level ones to replace them — some plucked directly from the comments sections. They’re still selling ads, and we readers keep coming back. I wouldn’t be to surprised to learn that the family of sites is more profitable now than before this group took over — costs are down, and ads and viewers are steady.That’s not to say I’d want to hang out with any of the management team. They sound pretty unlikeable (I never really got the whole “herb” thing, but it seems to be used in a derogatory manner), but they don’t really care if they’re liked by their employees (and certainly not their readers) as long as they’re making money off of them.
so odd they are moving away from virtual spaces?
Goodbye, AVC, for the last fucking time.
Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Dichen Lachman, Jen Tullock, Tramell Tillman, and Michael ChernusNo one will convince me these aren’t all made-up names
I know two of them! (Britt Lower from Man Seeking Woman, and Dichen Lachman from Dollhouse, SHIELD, and other stuff.)
You can see a lot of Dichen Lachman in the first series of ‘Altered Carbon’. And I mean a lot.
All names are made up…
Cheeky
Are we having fun yet?
i’m watching “party down” so that really hits home!
Is anyone else thinking to themselves, “maybe this can fill my Mr. Robot void?” It doesn’t look nearly as good, but ya nevah know.
Feels very Michel Gondry sans Gondry levity or imagination but I’ll give it a spin.
I don’t need some fancy sci-fi tech to forget work; drugs and alcohol work just fine.
Adam Scott looks…different, the way he looked when they did the Parks & Rec reunion show (at that time I thought maybe he was sick). More Botox than usual? a brow lift? does anyone else see it?
yeah I can’t quite pin what it is, but like he looks … puffier? and his eyes look… older and more tired. Though that could just be makeup for the character.
Well, I know we all think of him as the fresh-faced boy mayor or the aspiring actor working a catering job… but dude is pushing 50. Not every nice-guy white actor who can pull off comedy and drama can be Paul Rudd…
Paul Rudd puts the work into staying that young-looking. By which I mean he ritually drains the souls of stolen infants.
He looks extremely strange to me. Not just older or like he’s had work done, but.. either he had work done and it went wrong or they’re doing something to make him look weird intentionally.
Took me a hot second to recognize Arquette with the gray hair, but yeah i’m down for this. Great cast and curious premise.
I always find it funny how the entertainment industry produces so many works of fiction where people do “soulless office jobs” for some nefarious company with absolutely no understanding whatsoever what they’re contributing to.
Like, I get that people at the bottom of Lockheed Martin aren’t aware of the details in big government contracts or whatever, but they know they work on rockets. Even in this, where people literally don’t remember what they do at work, it seems that they don’t know what they’re are doing while at work either.But whatever. Adam Scott is in it, so I’m sure I’ll love it.
RIP AV Club
Everyone is doing the ambiguous time period thing now. 80s terminal, modern personal electronics, some 60s clothing, ‘75 police cruiser sedans
I’m pretty hyped to watch this. (Pirated, of course, I’m not giving a penny to Apple now or ever.)
Oh man, for a moment I thought it was an adaptation of Ling Ma’s 2018 novel ‘Severance’. Got excited and then disappointed lol