Severance, season 1 and 2
starring Britt Lower, Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, Patricia Arquette, Tramell Tillman, Jen Tullock, Sarah Bock, Dichen Lachman, Michael Chernus, Merrit Weaver and John Turturro. And also sometimes Christopher Walken. And, less frequently, John Noble. And Gwendoline Christie? And Sandra Bernhard? And Robbie frickin' Benson? Casting is drunk.
created by Dan Erickson (this is the first show he's run, as far as I can tell). Also somehow Ben Stiller is involved? I don't know, he shows up in a lot of interviews.
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This is definitely one of Those Shows, so if you don't want spoilers, STOP READING the rest of this thing, which will said things in. END OF WARNING.
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It's been a minute since I took the time here to review anything, at least since the the underwhelming final season of Umbrella Academy back in September of 2024. There are a few reasons why probably, like 1) that's right around the time I got a cat, 2) Thursday writing nights have begun overlapping with Thursday date nights, 3) logistically it's been harder to spend a long time really digging in to something since I have to work from the office again, since February, and 4) yes, that was right before the election and everything since then has been a tiny bit of a political, logistical, constitution and now-purposefully-economic disaster. The point is, for whatever reason, these things take up a lot more time and thought than a normal post I tend to squawk out like an improvised minor concerto of armpit farts between getting home from work and leaving to go see my lady friend. If you're not sure why any of this constitutes an especial challenge, well, I just spent a not-insubstantial paragraph on vamping and throat-clearing. This kind of thing is for the focused and the clear-headed, which, yeah, see above embedded numbered list.
First, I have to say I didn't quite realize that I was a genius until Apple TV had put out six episodes of season two. That's about the time I realized maybe I was interested in watching this show, which means I absolutely did not have to experience the annoyance of waiting three years between the MAJOR SUPER CLIFFHANGER ending season one and the start of the second. My girlfriend and I were able to pretty well binge the whole thing until we caught up with 2-3 episodes to go. Waiting for those was annoying enough, so three years, yeah... maybe I can't call myself a real fan since I didn't have to wade through that hazing, but I'm not really the type to volunteer for pop-culture battle scars anymore. I was one of the people who bought tickets for The Waterboy more than once just because it was showing the Star Wars Episode 1 trailer ahead of it. I'm all set for dork bona fides, thanks very much.
When we first fired it up, of course we were struck by the high-concept high-concept-ness of it all. The pilot is one of the best pilots I've ever seen, maybe the best one since Lost in 2004 and certainly since Game of Thrones in 2011. And if you know how both of those high-concept shows went out at the end, well, things don't bode super well for Severance if it's on that same upside-down-J curve trajectory.
Of course Lost and GoT suffered from different debilitating infirmities that resulted in them dying whimpering deaths at the end. And Severance resembles the former far more than the latter, even though it also features Gwendoline Christine savagely beating a man to death with her bare hands just like GoT did. No, Lost fancied itself a Great Big Bag of Mysteries that, after the finale, became clear that it was mostly full of dirt clods and old underwear. That's the trap for Severance, of course, that maybe all the quirky weirdness and out-there-ness it swims in as a medium will similarly be exposed as just a bunch of shit the writers made up as they went along that, in the final reckoning, can't ever really be reconciled. When Lost was finally over, we were all mad because it looked like TV but in the end, it felt like math homework.
What Severance has over Lost is that it isn't pretending that it's in our regular world. It has internal combustion engine cars and people speaking English and suburbs and corporations, but all the details of the world are bound by their own history and logic. That gives the writers way more leeway to make something of it without risking the jarring and straining of fitting the (at best) metaphysical or (at worst) fucking goofy mechanics of a world overlaid on our own, like Lost. Of course that also makes it more similar to GoT's closed-box world, and that didn't help it as much as you would have thought FLYING GIANT DRAGONS might have.
At first I was apprehensive and kind of mad early in the first season: the logic of the world was going to have to be so meticulous, with no bleed-over between characters and facts between Innie World and Outie World, it was forcing my anal mind* to track every detail to make sure these clever fuckers weren't trying to cheat me. So far, season one? Fucking aces. Season two? Eh, they're trying to have it both ways a bit; you can feel some of the strain.
This show obviously asks a lot of its actors, most of whom are playing two totally different characters who only happen to look exactly like them. Adam Scott of course I've seen in everything forever, and it's nice to see him outside of the Everyman types he normally plays to be kind of a loser/dick as Outie Mark Scout. We empathize because he's a widower, but he's a mean, antisocial dipshit mostly, which was kind of nice. Innie Mark S. is more in line with Standard Adam Scott Man, but is an appropriately gormless (at first) paper doll, which serves to outline both versions of the character a bit more starkly, and gives him a ton of places to grow.
We spend far less time with the Outie versions of Britt Lower, Zach Cherry and John Turturro's characters, but they each get at least one episode to breathe the outside air (Cherry's one word scream "Gretchen!" in season two is the highlight line reading of all the episodes. Talk about making the most with a little). Britt Lower is the low-key star of the piece, as the audience surrogate new employee at Lumon on the Severed Floor. The writers put her all the way through it in season one, which she marches through with her now-signature strut, with rage and fear and the clear-eyed surety of a coyote caught in a foot trap: there's no question what needs to be done, it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it.
The production design, the camera work, the editing, all of it is really second to none, some far and away the best I've seen on a television show, which is what you should be feeling on productions with unlimited money. With some blank hallways and faux fluorescent lighting, they've achieved more here aesthetically than Amazon Prime has with a billion dollars on Rings of Power. It's a joy to look at and to be emotionally abused by.
Like most high concept shows, however, the most fun is in the first season when we're establishing the rules of the world and watching the characters come to grips with it. Season two means we have to watch the writers struggle with maintaining fidelity to their own limits, which can be fun, but you can feel the strain. The overlain story is more melodrama than drama (the dead wife ISN'T REALLY DEAD?!), which, OK. The most interesting storyline, Mark's risky "reintegration" procedure, is where it bogs down the most as the stakes and ticking-clock of it are sort of suggested but then awkwardly set aside when it's inconvenient for other story beats they're trying to cram in.
I'm embarrassed to say I'm of two minds about it, though: you have to admire the producers and writers giving themselves something this hard to do, but at the same time, when it's not quite hitting, you feel it all the more. You can feel in season two when they are saying "just trust us..." when characters make decisions to drag things out for... reasons... or plot points are just kind of tied off, most egregiously with Karen Aldridge's Dr. Reghabi who a) murders a guy, which is never spoken of again and b) makes a big deal about how important Mark's reintegration is, but just nopes out when it's time to nope out.
But again, those points leap out because of how tight everything else is. I like how the lore of the world doesn't really matter in detail (I don't really need to know anything about Keir or whoever else, just keep shout-singing his songs, Patricia Arquette), it just keeps everything tied together in the neatest bow it can manage, even as the package keeps getting bigger.
Normally I'd say it was a massive failure that I don't really care if Mark gets his not-dead wife back, but that's also kind of the point of the show. Mark Scout is the b-antagonist of the piece really, behind of course Lumon itself. The kernel of the show is that the lives led on the Severed Floor are lives, which is something Cherry's Dylan insists on over and over (if someone quits, you don't have a going-away party, you have a funeral). Everything outside is a threat to their existence, most immediately their Outie personas. The show did a lot of work to make the Mark-Gemma relationship feel as real as possible this season, but Helly R. and Mark S. are the stars of this show, your put-upon protagonists. Gemma escaped? Great, good for her, I'm anti-torture as a rule. But the Real World in this reality is always dark and cold and snowy and bleak. Let's spend more time down in the climate controlled basement, where it never snows and the overhead lighting is always on. If this show has any analog to giant flying dragons, this is where they'd live anyway.
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*that's not an awkward phrasing, that's where I keep it
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