Severance, on Apple Plus (2022, 2025), begins with Mark (Adam Scott) sitting in his car outside the Lumen Corporation, crying. I can relate -- during my office job, a horrible nine months at the Getty Consternation Institute, I cried a lot -- before work, after work, during lunch, while sitting at my desk. But this job takes the humiliation and dehumanization, and takes it to a new level:
Mark has been severed, split into work and life selves. The two selves, his innie and his outtie, have no memory of each other. So he has no idea what goes on in that dark, sinister building. But we do.
He takes an elevator to the sub-basement, the severance wing, endless corridors, painted white with no signs and no decor except for an occasional painting of Company Founder/Messiah Kier performing miracles or punishing sinners.
You're not supposed to wander around anyway, and trying to make a map is strictly forbidden. Innies do not remember anything about their life outside, so from their point of view, the work day ends, they step into the elevator, and immediately step out again for the next work day.
From the innies' point of view, they never leave. Their lives consist entirely of endless white-walled corridors and harsh fluorescent lights. They never see or hear anything about the outside world. This is only a slight exaggeration of the real corporate world, where you aren't supposed to talk about or think about your life outside the office.
They eat Lumen-brand snacks from Lumen vending machines, paid for with Lumen tokens.
They have nothing to read except the multi-volume handbook, where the rules are written as Bible verses:
No outside reading material: "Be content in my words, and dally not in the scholastic pursuits of lesser men."
No sleeping on the job: "No workplace shall be repurposed for slumber."
Their purpose in life: "And I shall whisper to ye dutiful through the ages. In your noblest thoughts and epiphanies shall be my voice. You are my mouth, and through ye, I will whisper on when I am 10 centuries demised."
The outside world is no paradise, either. It's always a gray, cloudy, drizzly late winter. Mark's house, provided by Lumen, is nearly empty, with only a few pieces of furniture and no decorations of any type. He might as well be at work.
The job of the Macrodata Refinement Department is seemingly meaningless: rows of numbers slide by on a screen. You must capture and dispose of those that produce emotions like disgust and fear. Workers have no idea what this is doing; finding errors in computer code, rating movies, murdering people?
The main group works in a huge, featureless room with four desks. It consists of:
1. Mark (Adam Scott, top left), who has just been promoted to team leader after his best friend Petey vanishes and is not to be mentioned again. His outtie took the job because his wife just died (of course; what focus character on tv doesn't have a dead wife?), and his innie doesn't remember her.
His main outtie plotline involves meeting Petey on the outside: he has been re-integrated, and wants Mark to help him reveal what the corporation/cult is really up to.
2. Comic relief Dylan (Zach Cherry, bottom right), who finds solace in petty office squabbles. So far, he hasn't gotten a plotline of his own.
3. True believer Irving (John Turturro, top right), who criticizes Mark for not following the rules to the letter, has most of the multi-volume Handbook memorized, and longs for the new work totes, with different pictures of Savior Kier performing his miracles (they get a new one every month). He starts a forbidden workplace romance with Burt (Christopher Walken, bottom photo), who works in Optics and Design. The other Macrodata Refinement workers are horrified because they believe that the O&D workers started a bloody revolt a few years ago.
4. Helly (Britt Lower, bottom left), a new innie who doesn't want to be there and keeps trying to smuggle messages out telling her outtie to not return. Her insubordination results in a few days in the Break Room. Next she threatens to cut off her fingers with a paper cutter unless she is allowed to take out a "Don't come back!" message to her outtie. This is eprmitted, but her outtie sends back a message: "I am a person. You are not. You will do what you are told." Finally (in the last episode we watched) she attempts suicide.
The main keeper is Mr. Milchik (Trammell Tillman, who is gay in real life). He's the friendly face who delivers the snacks and answers the phone when you call in sick, but he's also in charge of the brainwashing Break Room. Imagine sitting there for two days while your subject repeats the same passage from the Scripture...um, Handbook...over and over and over.
When there is a big problem with morale or insubordination, like using a fire extinguisher to break through to the stairwell and try to escape, the stern Mr. Graner appears (Michael Cumpsty, who is gay in real life).
Both answer to the head of the severance floor, Mrs. Cobel, who has not been severed: she has some anecdotes about her childhood, and knows what's happening outside. Her outtie, fuly cognizant, goes undercover as a dotty widow, moves in next to Mark, and keeps tabs on him, in case the reintegrated Pauley shows up.
At work, Mrs. Cobel must deal with the ominous, non-speaking Board. It's scary manipulation and mind-control all the way up.
I have two problems with the premise:
1. If they won't remember anything anyway, why not let the workers quit if they want? Why go through all the trouble of brainwashing and torturing them?
2. For that matter, if they don't know what their "finding the wrong numbers" job is actually doing, so why sever them at all? Perhaps all will be revealed later.
Plus there was an annoying gay tease in the first episode. Outtie Mark is picked up by his Lesbian-Stereotype sister (Jen Tullock, who is gay in real life) and taken to a food-less dinner party at the home of a gay couple, Gay-Stereotype Ricken (Michael Chernus, left) and Patton (Donald Webber Jr.). She has a girlfriend there, too, and there's another woman, doubtless Mark's date.
After the party is over, Lesbian-Stereotype Sister suggests that Mark spend the night with her so she won't have to drive him all the way home. She's revealed to be pregnant. Then Gay-Stereotype Ricken comes in and kisses her.
Wait -- they're a couple? Who decided to make the sister a super-butch, and her boyfriend a snap queen, and then stage the scene deliberately to obfuscate their relationship and make it seem 100% like they are dating other people?
I hate it when they jerk you around like that. It was almost a deal-breaker.
My Grade: Points off for the dead wife, the cliche "You're arrogant!" Mark-Helly romance, the annoying gay tease, and the silly pregnant sister plotline, but I like the Kafa-esque bureacracy, the parody of real-life soul-destroying workplaces, and the trippy visuals. I have mixed feelings about the forbidden gay romance; it's not forbidden because it's gay, but still... B.
See also: Wet Hot American Summer Episode 1.5: Skyler in a satyr costume, a gaslit gay couple, learning how to use your d*ck
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