How 'Severance' Skewers Modern Capitalism
Actors Zach Cherry and Tramell Tillman enjoy a “dance party experience” as a workplace reward. [your mom/YouTube]
Over the past two decades, banks and tech companies have stealthily tried to colonize employees’ lives by bringing as many services as they can to the office.
We’re talking about much more than free snacks. Many high-end knowledge workers now rely on their employers for dry cleaning, medical checkups, child care, exercise classes, transportation and even their social lives. (To say nothing of corporate-branded swag.) This isn’t benevolent, of course; companies are trying to extract as much labor as possible from workers by minimizing time spent on everyday tasks. They haven’t, however, managed to solve the most basic problem (at least for bosses): people are still people, and sometimes their personal lives get in the way of being perfect employees.
This is the conundrum addressed in Severance, the bizarre and darkly brilliant new show from Apple TV+. In the show’s not-so-alternate reality, there’s a neurological procedure called “severance” that psychologically splits a person in half. One version of the person, the “innie,” exists only at work, ideally operating as a professional drone, while the other, the “outie,” leads a normal life, save for the eight hours a day that disappear while their innie is at work. Each is kept completely isolated from the other.
After undergoing severance, people are rebooted like computers and transformed into blank slates with no knowledge about themselves or the outside world the second they clock into work.
Severance is set on the “severed” floor of Lumon Industries, an enormous corporation somewhere in the suburban Northeast. What the company does exactly is never mentioned, and instead employees are fed reverent accounts of Lumon’s past CEOs, all descendants of the founder, Kier Eagan, who is regarded as nothing short of a god. (“Praise Kier!” is a common, creepy refrain.)
When employees take the elevator down to the subterranean severed floor, they transform into innies, leaving behind all traces of their aboveground lives. Lumon ensures the total subservience of its severed employees – and the company’s own privacy – through intense security measures that keep information from leaving the severed floor.
Our heroes in this world are four severed data refiners, whose work consists of singling out “scary” numbers as they float, free of context, across their computer screens. (This makes as much sense to them as it does to us.)
The season opens on one of these employees, Helly R. (Britt Lower), as she wakes up from the procedure – which, to put it mildly, she isn’t happy about – and attempts to figure out what the hell is going on. While initially processing her experience, she gets very little help from her colleagues: Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (played by John Turturro in a brilliant role that includes a will-they-won’t-they relationship with Christopher Walken).
Over the course of the season, as we spend more time with the ‘outie’ versions of these workers, we learn why our protagonists have chosen to sever – grief, trauma or perhaps, most worryingly of all, real belief in the system. All of these people want to compartmentalize areas of their lives that they don’t feel emotionally capable of handling. Lumon’s nefarious insight is that, by offering a procedure that to some resembles salvation, it can accelerate the process of turning people into commodities.
Like any corporation high on its own Kool-Aid, Lumon’s internal culture is illegible to the outside world. This estrangement is conveyed in its physical design: The sprawling concrete headquarters evoke a fortress, and on the severed floor, employees wander through white hallways that go on forever, admiring the terrifyingly banal paint-by-numbers art on the walls. Kudos to the show’s lighting and set designers, who have managed to create environments that strike the right balance between dystopian and dryly funny. I particularly enjoyed watching employees gather around a celebratory melon bar – that is, a festive bar cart loaded with cantaloupe scooped into tiny balls – in the midst of a clinical office setting.
Helly quickly learns that even though her colleagues have no idea what they’re working on, it doesn’t matter so long as the perks keep rolling in: Whenever somebody hits a quota, they get rewarded with a Chinese finger trap, coffee cozy, personal caricature, or, best of all, a waffle party.
Lumon’s real genius appears to be keeping employees docile while the company furthers its ambition. What exactly this might be, however, remains mysterious, and the clues we are given don’t resolve very much. Why did Mark and Helly discover a room full of baby goats? What does the optics department actually do? The show has already been signed for a second season, so viewers will find out soon enough.
In the meantime, there’s ample opportunity to wonder how far this dystopian world really is from our own.
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