Severance (Apple TV+)

Severance is a TV show that is based on a fairly simple premise but takes it to a lot of very interesting places that remain uniquely part of the show but resonate strongly with a string of other things.

The idea is that someone worked out a neurosurgical procedure called severance that lets you create a completely separate other personality, based off the original and controllably switch between them. More strictly, it separates the memories of the two but memories help define our personalities. In the show this gives you a working “innie” and an away-from-work “outie” that have no real memory of each other, although each is aware of the other's existence. The innies are rewarded with positive affirmations (often false) about what their outies are like.

The workplace is weird in more ways than this. The main group of characters look at numbers on a screen and when they feel odd they sort them into bins and “nullify” them. That is almost exactly how the job is described to the new recruit and what we see them do. This core group is four strong and they don’t match up, which is classic sitcom setup, but the tensions aren’t allowed to resolve into comedy, rather they’re screwed tighter by both internal dynamics and interactions with those outside the group, such as their manager, another department and so on.

There are a lot of really interesting questions that come up. I’ve never had a job where you go in, do the work, and as soon as you leave, that’s it. Even in my current job, where 90% of the job is like that, I email, make phone calls and the like when I’m at home and outside my paid hours. This raises that “work stays at work” ethos to the ultimate degree: you literally can’t think about work. That’s an interesting experience for me.

Then we layer up new twists. Hellie, the new recruit, hates working for Lumon (the company) and tries to escape several times. This means we see dark side of the company as she’s not allowed to leave, her freedoms are encroached in numerous ways and there’s a massive dance of levers and techniques used to keep her in line. Given the way I initially read this and my later adjustment (see below) this is scary in a fascinating, can’t look away, fashion. Then there is a weird interdepartmental rivalry mixed with a somewhat twisted bromance. When Christopher Walken is one of the actors in the bromance and he’s the more normal one that tells you something…

We also discover Lumon is organised as a cult. Sometimes this runs more strongly and others less strongly but there’s always a thread of it running through.

At various points this combination gives the show a very 1984 feeling. We have a literal example of doublethink, but there’s a lot of surveillance and a sense of Big Brother. We even have a forbidden text although the context is quite different. But there are deeper things going on, some of which I feel i missed for the first time in a long time in an American show. American corporate culture is different to British corporate culture and I have never really been a part of that. Even though technically I now work for a big company, I work very much alone - taking notes and emailing them on to students, emailing and rarely phoning the people who coordinate my hours with my students. That’s really all the contact I have despite knowing there are thousands of other people doing the same job. That makes it hard to pick up the nuances, especially when they have another layer of national differences on top.

Without that, I was wondering if this was a commentary on totalitarian states for the longest time. The last two episodes made me radically revise that opinion of the intent. I'm 99% sure his is a critique, or a satire, of American corporate culture and the way it exploits and abuses the workforce. The fact that it so closely parallels 1984 and other totalitarian states in fiction at least is possibly deliberate but certainly fascinating.

This series is not a quick, easy watch. It’s not hard in the sense of triggering, violent or anything. I just found it thought provoking and stopped to think after every episode, sometimes for extended periods. The twists for the final two episodes are huge. Game changing. Genius. I can honestly say I wondered about the nature of one but didn’t see the actual twist coming. The other was so far away from anything I was even looking for it was truly amazing. If any other show landed one of these it would feel proud, and here we have two… amazing.

Bechdel Test: Pass. Over the episodes we don’t have a single pair of women that make this pass, but there are enough in every episode that it does. Most of them involve Patricia Arquette's character.

Ko Test: Pass. This is much more skin of the teeth, but we have a few WOC who get speaking parts in various scenes over the episodes. I think there might be an episode that failed but I wasn’t sure, and with the variety of characters that passed, and the high proportion of them (about half the female parts are WOC who mostly pass individually) in every episode they’re in) I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Another thing that predisposes me to give this show that benefit of the doubt is that, without counting exactly, it looks a lot like there’s a 50-50 balance of men and women, and a good diversity among both the men and women we see. While this test is about positive representation by speaking roles for WOC, that wider representation of women and WOC earned it some benefit of the doubt here.

Russo Test: Fail. This was close. There’s an argument the innies are mostly ace. But their outies are mostly straight so I’m not convinced that’s true, they’re straight characters at work not having office romances. In the final episode we find out that the outie of a pretty important character is gay. Should I go back and reassess his character as gay all the way through? I think the answer is no. It’s pretty clear that he innie and outie are not identical, just very similar. Without going into details, Mike, the lead character, chose to be severed because he was basically unable to function outside when he made the decision. While his situation has improved, he’s still broken but recovering. His innie might well be far from perfect, particularly on the empathy front, but he seems to be a normally dysfunctional adult male. It’s really not clear hat his innie is gay and while I assume he is, it’s really not clear. If I can’t be sure that his innie is meant to be gay, I can’t let him pass the first step of the test.