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Severance: Season One

Happy 2025, Readers of Doux! If you're like me, your new year's resolutions were less "hit the gym four times a week" and more "find a new show to binge." If so, please allow me to validate that intention. I'm a firm believer that spudding is an essential form of self care (in my family, "spud" is a verb meaning "to be a couch potato"). This is doubly true if you are actually going to the gym four times a week.

And if you're also a procrastinator like me, that means that you added Severance to your watchlist approximately three years ago, and you recently realized that time was running out for you to catch up before the new season drops... checks... tomorrow. The good news is that every now and again procrastination pays off, and we procrastinators don't have to wait years to find out what's on the other side of a spectacular cliffhanger. Thank Kier.

As this review will contain mild spoilers, I will let you know pre-spoilers that, if you have come here to find out whether you should watch Severance, the answer is emphatically "yes." If subsequent seasons are as strong as the first, it has a good shot at making into my list of favorite shows of all time.


Severance is technically science fiction, but it lands in the reality-adjacent "speculative fiction" corner. Its world is close enough to our own to be recognizable, but just different enough that we could imagine ending up there if our timeline had wobbled in just a slightly different direction or if we had a few more years for things to get truly weird (okay: weird-er). The premise is the sort of simple concept that one toys with while showering or commuting: wouldn't it be cool if we could just forget all about work when we're not there?

Well... no, it probably would not be cool at all. It doesn't take more than a few seconds of pondering this question to imagine the many, many ways that it could go wrong for either the working half or the playing half of one's self, known in Severance as one's "innie" or "outie." Severance doesn't waste too much time enumerating the obvious drawbacks of this scenario (the innie never goes outside and is effectively imprisoned at work, etc.). Instead, it takes a far more interesting approach of following this scenario to extremes, which is not to say the extremes would not be realistic.

Our lives are so vast, our memories so deep and broad, our knowledge of the world around us ever-expanding both through experience and the internet, that it's nearly impossible to envision what our lives would be like if both our knowledge and experience were bounded by a single building. If our social connections consisted only of a handful of other people. If we had no history, no family, and nothing at all to dream of or to hope for.

This setup could be grim or even nihilistic, and while Severance takes some very dark turns, it also has great fun offering answers to this "what if." If our world were so small, would we look nearby for a new theology, one enforced by corporate, quasi-religious rituals? Would we be more susceptible to authority or even brain-washing? Would we come to embrace and even love our new world, however limited it may be? "There's a life to be had here," Mark (Adam Scott) tells Helly (Britt Lower). Severance suggests that human nature leads us to try living a fulfilling life under any circumstances.

It doesn't suggest that the imprisoned lives of the innies are always worse. The main character, Mark, is mourning his wife, and feels that he is doing his innie a kindness by shielding him from the pain. Outie Mark lives a lonely life, isolated by his grief, whereas innie Mark visibly perks up when he steps into the office each day, striding jauntily down the hallways on the way to the four-person office that has been his universe for two years.

Adam Scott has always had a reliably wry presence as the resident straight man. In Severance, he gets to play not one but two characters that are more dramatic than his prior roles. Hopefully Severance will expand his future opportunities to capitalize on a talent that his previous roles have only hinted at. His innie and outie Marks are recognizable as the same person, but he uses subtle body language and facial expressions to differentiate the two. It's an impressive performance in a cast that doesn't have a weak link. Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken all offer performances that are among the best of their long and varied careers. Severance also offers memorable roles to lesser-known cast members, including Britt Lower as the recently severed Helly and Tramell Tillman as the company man who alternately rewards and terrorizes the severed workers.


As you may have guessed from its ads, Severance is also one of the most visually striking shows you'll ever see. They wisely chose to shoot in the widest of widescreen aspect ratios (2.39:1), giving the show a feel that is somehow both empty and claustrophobic. Widescreen is often used for vistas and and visions; here, it encloses each scene in a vise, the horizon only as far as the nearest wall. Many shots have a sterile, rigid symmetry, but the extra width allows the asymmetrical shots to feel even more unbalanced. Characters are sometimes squeezed into a corner of the screen, the camera isolating and diminishing them. The hallways of the Lumon corporation are endless white mazes, and certain other long, dark hallways are literally the stuff of nightmares for the innies. The natural world barely makes an appearance, and the winter setting ensures that the outside world holds no more comfort than the corporate chill of the office.

Severance is not the first show or film to toy with questions of identity and memory – Blade Runner, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dollhouse, Westworld, and Counterpart all play with similar ideas – but they're the type of unanswerable philosophical questions that art should never stop asking. To what degree are our selves the product of our memories? Who might we be if our life experiences had been different? Does a forgotten experience continue to affect us? If we could forcibly remove a painful memory, would we? And what would we lose in doing so? Is a great romantic love inevitable, or does it depend on memory and circumstance?

All these questions run under the surface of a plot that moves with increasing urgency over the course of the season. The pilot episode was full of hooks into a surreal world of altered minds, corporate conspiracies, and office dramedy, and the season that followed built on all of these themes while adding romance, suspense, and the thrill of a mutiny and prison break unlike any other.

So yes, you should watch Severance. Then let's sit down and discuss it over a dinner without dinner.
---
Mothra

13 comments:

  1. Mothra, thank you so much for reviewing this series for us, and right under the wire. I'm a big fan of really good science fiction, and Severance blew me away. I just did a rewatch to prepare myself for the second season and I'm very much looking forward to it.

    There is something so chilling and inhuman about this series. I mean, I get why Mark wanted to give his other self relief from pain and grief, but I also find it difficult to understand how *anyone* could do this to themselves.

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    1. I'm finding that I have to do some substantial suspension of disbelief, beyond just the technical and logistical impossibilities related to the premise. During the first episode I found myself thinking that no way in heck would anyone ever decide to "sever" themselves. I had to flip that off in my brain to get past the first episode, because yeah, it's nearly impossible to believe, even given some of the characters' stated motivations.

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  2. Severance has been on my radar to see. I will have to figure out where it's offered in Canada, as I am contemplating shifting my streaming packages anyway. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Memento are among my favorite films, so I'm a sucker for work that plays with the relationship between memory and identity.

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    1. Ah, how did I forget Memento?! Good call. As for where to watch it, I wasn't sure I wanted to sign up for another service, so I actually watched the first season on DVDs I got from my local library. Of course now I'm hooked, so I ended up signing up to see the second season streaming.

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  3. Like Billy said, I don't understand the fundamental inhumanity at play in the heart of the show myself either. It's really, superbly well-crafted. But I feel like watching season 2 is gonna be like season 3 of Twin Peaks, you know? None of it really resonates with me, but I love stuff like that one dance scene where you see the supervisor/boss's animal display of domination. I don't like The Office (US) either. Everyone there's just mean or "quantifiably bitchy." Worth it ultimately only for the opening credits -- for me, I mean

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    1. Dear lord, please let it be better than S3 of Twin Peaks.

      I guess I see the "inhumanity" as more of the frame of the show than the core. The quartet of innies and their outie counterparts are the heart of the show, and I love they way they hang onto their humanity in such a potentially soul-crushing situation.

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  4. Thank you for this great review!

    I really enjoyed Severance. Or maybe I should say I got really hooked on it. I'm very ambivalent about whether to watch the second season, since the show was so despairing, both inside and outside. It felt a bit hopeless.

    But maybe in a good way?

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    1. What I'm enjoying about it is the contrast between the bleakness and the humanity of the characters, like wildflowers pushing through cracks in concrete. I loved the slow transition the innies made from average office workers to revolutionaries, which I found inspiring and not at all hopeless. I just finished the first episode of S2, and I'm excited that I have zero idea where they're going with the next season.

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    2. That's really well said!

      I tried the first episode of S2, and realized I definitely needed to rewatch S1 first. It's a nice task to assign myself!

      Also, very random, but: as Adam Scott ages he starts to look more and more like one of my uncles. It's becoming uncanny.

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  5. I saw the first episode with my parents the other day. We had all heard rave reviews and were curious. But we all bounced off it hard. I could appreciate the craft that went into it. It's gorgeous and the camera work is great and some of the writing plucks at my brain in interesting ways and the acting is very good... but I was left so cold by the end of it and the time dragged. It felt way longer than an hour, and not in a fun way.

    Is this a show that takes a few episodes to get into? Is it simply more a cerebral show than one that gets you invested in the characters?

    Also being an "innie" sounds like hell. Do they literally just blink and their work day restarts again? How do they not go insane? It sounds like it would be part of a horrific time loop or something in a different movie/show.

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    1. Fangirl, I am of the opinion that everyone's mileage varies and if the show doesn't intrigue you, it doesn't intrigue you. There's so much other stuff out there that you shouldn't waste your time, you know?

      Severance does accelerate, big time, if that helps, and I definitely got invested in the characters. The horror of being an "innie" and what they do about it is very much the core of the story.

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    2. I'd give it one more episode. I recall that I took a while to get into it.

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    3. Billie, I usually subscribe to that philosophy as well, but a lot of my favorite shows have also needed a little bit to fully get their feet under them.

      I might give it one more episode, like Josie suggests, this weekend. We shall see if I get distracted by something else or not first! haha

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