I’ve liked Adam Scott for years and I had a crush on his Ben Wyatt character from Parks and Recreation. <3 Ben Wyatt 4ever.

I went into Severance mostly blind. I had a shallow understanding of the intriguing premise without much context, and I’m hearing Apple TV+ is absolutely killing it with their original programming. Do we have a new HBO on our hands? Or is the feelgood chicanery of Tad Lasso just a delightful fluke?? Time will tell.

The Premise

Lumon Industries is a megacorporation that has developed a surgical procedure called “severance” that can separate a person’s work memories from their memories outside of work. The outside version of the severed employee walks into the elevator at 9am and the door immediately opens at 5pm with a complete break in consciousness and no memory of their work day. Conversely, the inside version of the employee walks into the elevator at 5pm and the door immediately opens the next day at 9am with no memory of their outside life, essentially creating an existence of endless work for the inside version. We mostly follow Mark Scout (Adam Scott, known as Mark S. on the inside), a Lumon employee who voluntarily agreed to the severance procedure as a means to cope with the loss of his wife. His “outie” is a depressed alcoholic. His “innie” is an engaged hard worker who doesn’t spend too much time ruminating upon his unending existence within a windowless office floor.

Mark S. is in a department with three other people: Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), Irving B. (John Turturro), and the newly-arrived Helly R. (Britt Lower). We see these people bent over a computer for eight hours a day doing what appears to be nonsensical busy work. We see Helly’s increasing sense of agitation, fear, and existential dread. The audience learns that the innies can never leave, because “leaving” isn’t freedom. It’s death. We see these people being psychologically, possibly physically, tortured by their gaslighting superiors Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) and Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette). The show touches upon many themes: corporate greed, morality, ethics, slavery, identity, persistence of consciousness, depression, anxiety, death, even love.

The Walken Mind-Meld. Once you go in, you may never come out.

As the season moves along, the audience continues to pick up clues about the implications of severance, the motivations of both versions of the severed, the agenda of Lumon Industries, and a very large conspiracy.

In short, this show is fucking awesome.

My Half-Baked Thoughts

I’m not much of a binger, but I finished all 9 episodes in 4 days. If life permitted, I probably would’ve knocked it out in 2. This is the best show I’ve seen in a long, long time, and probably the best Season 1 of anything I’ve ever watched.

There’s just so much about Severance that checks off my boxes: great acting, great soundtrack, a thought-provoking premise, a captivating and addictive story, eerie mystery, and plenty of philosophy. Only two days after finishing the series, I started watching it again with my wife. I never, ever binge and rewatch. Ever. It’s never happened before now.

Realistically, the last time I felt this absorbed by a TV show was when I was binging upon the first 3 seasons of Lost on DVD, way back in 2008. Lost was the first time I took a non-comedy television series seriously, having spent the entirety of the first 20 years of my life steeped in adult cartoons and Comedy Central. Sure, other shows have scratched that itch to some degree. The usual suspects: The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, then maybe some Better Call Saul, some Fargo, some Mad Men, some Stranger Things, yada yada yada. Nothing has quite stirred my imagination like Severance though. I’m spending much of my time lately putting my self in the characters’ shoes; daydreaming about what it must feel like to descend that elevator at 9am and immediately find the door reopening at 5pm. Or, horrifyingly, vice versa. I’m combing Reddit for discussions on opinions on the moral, psychological, and philosophical ramifications of the severance procedure. I’m theorizing upon the motivations of Lumon Industries, the reasons why some of the “outie” versions of characters are deciding to undergo the severance procedure, and what these “innies” are actually working on while in the office.

Must’ve been a good office party.

More than anything else, though, Severance has reignited my existential crisis in full force. Every once in a while I spend a blissful amount of days or weeks thinking constantly about death, consciousness, and non-existence. I’m not a religious person, I don’t believe in an afterlife, so the finality of dying and ceasing to exist is a cause of a lot of anxiety for me. It’s incredibly cool and fun. Let’s go into detail!

Death
Innie Helly spends much of the first few episodes plotting her escape out of the severed floor of the Lumon building, mostly in trying to relay a message to her outie counterpart. I was initially rooting for Innie Helly to succeed, hoping that Outie Helly would get the hint and let herself quit the job. I didn’t think at first that Innie Helly only actually exists because Outie Helly returns to work every day. Innie Helly can never actually escape and leave. If Outie Helly decides to quit and never return, the last thing Innie Helly ever sees is that elevator door closing at 5pm.

This shit messed with my head. I have spent a lot of time and mental energy trying to fathom the idea of an eternity of sudden non-existence. I’ve conceptualized the break and return to consciousness to be immediate, similar to real life accounts of general anesthesia or waking from a coma. A complete lack of awareness of the passage of time. Severance does a fantastic job of displaying this break in consciousness. Innies return to work immediately after the elevator closes, whether an evening or a whole weekend passed. An outie could have a serious life-threatening accident that puts them out of work for months, and their innie would just be confused that they feel some lingering pain the “next” morning. An outie could quit her job for decades and return to her old post, with the innie suddenly finding an office of brand new faces, looking in the mirror with disbelief at how much she aged. I’ve done my own thought experiments about similar circumstances. I could die for a day and return with little inconvenience. How about a week? If the passage of time was an instant, why would I care? How about ten months? Big deal, right? 18 years? I wouldn’t even know it happened. 1,000,000 years? That would be trippy, but I wouldn’t know the difference.

It’s the never returning part that fucks me up. I could show up again in the blink of an eye after the universe bangs and crunches 1,000,000,000 times in a row, spanning unfathomable amounts of eons. Perhaps I’d be disoriented, but there’s something still comforting about the returning part. As long as I return, I don’t care how long I’d be gone. But forever? With no end? Why is that so much more terrifying?

Part of me believes that if it were me in that office, no matter how absolutely miserable and torturous a life of unending work and poor treatment would be, I’d be anxious every time I ascended that elevator at 5pm that it wouldn’t open up again. Every night could potentially be death. What a horrific thought.

Ben Wyatt has really seen better days.

Parenting
This is an interesting angle that took me a while to grasp onto. Part of my triggered existential crisis involved parenting, but I didn’t know it until I spent a lot of time thinking about the show.

A large theme of Severance is morality. On the surface, the idea of going through a surgical procedure that will permanently cut the shitty 8-hour workday out of your life sounds extremely enticing. God knows I considered it when I first started the show. Once you really dig into it, though, you come to the realization that severance will actually create a brand new consciousness. A consciousness that essentially begins its life on that conference table, completely wiped of personal memories. Sure, personality traits are retained. Language is retained. General world knowledge is retained, to an extent. Some suspension of disbelief is required to understand that these innies have no knowledge of personal experiences before their initial wake-up while retaining everything else, nor will they have any personal experiences outside of the office. Herein lies the moral sticking point: The outie made the decision to bring the innie into existence. Without their consent, they are subjected to a life they probably never would have asked for without any possibility of leaving. If an innie wants to quit and he’s not allowed, that’s fucked up. Slavery.

I know it’s not quite like that at all, but I’ve been very much struggling with the reality that I brought two children into this world without their consent and I have to make good about it by making sure they’re really happy all the time and grow up to be functioning adults who don’t whine or kill people or question the system or go to jail or cut themselves or work for IBM or have to take an armload of meds like I do! I think that’s a tall order and I have anxiety about it constantly. I think this show has really triggered that sinking feeling in my stomach, and it has solidified my anti-severance stance.

Fun fact: Zach Cherry held his arms out for so long during filming that now even his muscles have muscles.

Speaking of which, I’m spend a lot of time ruminating upon putting myself in the innies’ shoes. As somebody who doesn’t get much satisfaction from work nor has his identity tied to his career, undergoing a surgical procedure to cut out those eight hours of my life sounds pretty attractive, actually. At least at first. Besides the surgical procedure part, which we saw performed on Helly and it looked rather gross, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat if I was assured it was safe. I mean, worst case scenario I quit my job and I never feel the effects of time loss again. The only thing I would need to worry about is the chip exploding in my brain! And, let’s be real here, would that be so bad?

Knowing that it wouldn’t actually be me trapped in the office since the show makes it pretty clear that the “original” is the one that stays outside, would I still do it? Maybe. I’m pretty fucking selfish like that. If I had an inkling that the innies were getting tortured, though, then I’m in a spot. Do I keep going to keep myself alive? Do I quit and kill that part of myself?

In the end, who cares? This show is really good!

Worth the Watch?

Abso-fucking-lutely yes it is. Did you read any of what I just wrote?

They’re filming Season 2 as we speak. It’ll be hard to top after such a stellar first season, so I’m nervous that the writers will take a crap all over the show and start introducing time-travelling DeLoreans and Great Gazoos. If it goes in this direction, we can all pretend that Season 1 was just a Severance miniseries and call it good.

Plus, we’ll always have the Milchick Dance.

Hubba hubba. Get down with your bad self.