By Marc Stoufer III
Apple TV+’s office-comedy-meets-thriller, “Severance,” delivers visceral emotion in a consistently unique package.
In 2012, aspiring writer Dan Erickson was living the Hollywood dream – working a series of temp jobs to pay rent while trying to write a pitchable show. Despite the allure of driving for Postmates and working at a door factory, he found the process demoralizing.
“(I) caught myself thinking, ‘What if there was some way to just disassociate, and for my body to do whatever it needs to do over the next eight hours to earn this paycheck – to not have to consciously experience it?,’” Erickson recalled in an interview with Script Magazine. “As soon as that idea came, it was like, ‘OK, there’s definitely a story there.’”
After a meeting with Ben Stiller’s production company, Red Hour, “Severance” was born.
The show follows Mark Scout, an employee of Lumon Industries. Nobody knows what they do, only that each employee is severed, meaning their consciousness is split between work memories and life memories, transitioning as they take the elevator up to work each day. When a new employee starts asking questions, though, “Mark S” and his coworkers realize that Lumon might have more sinister intentions than they imagined.
“Severance” is a unique hat trick of a series. It’s often impossible to guess where the story is going, but the show never tricks its audience to get there. Instead of relying on cheap twists and episode-end cliffhangers, each episode builds multiple plotlines that breathe in tandem to accelerate the tempo and tension to and beyond its end.
The stakes in this show are real and lasting, with every character’s decision fundamentally changing the plot of the entire rest of the series.
Despite this – and the complex lingo of the world, from “innies” and “outies” to “reintegration” to the “Overtime Contingency Protocol” – the writing by Erickson and his team remains remarkably natural-sounding. At no point does this sound like a sci-fi show. It’s a show about secrets and about the nature of power and what people do to get it that happens to be set in a sci-fi parallel world.
Adam Scott was the first to be cast, at Stiller’s insistence, and his performance reflects that. Especially as he increasingly plays both the “innie” and “outie” version of his character in the same episode, Scott’s nuance in specificity of emotion and comedic timing grounds the show in heart.
The rest of the cast, too, acts as a well-oiled machine of an ensemble, with the relationship between every character always coming through. Tramell Tillman stands out as Lumon company man Seth Milchick, expertly balancing the friendly face of the organization with its more menacing underbelly through irreverent dance numbers and impassioned monologues.
These performances are underscored by the masterful music of composer Theodore Shapiro. Blending classical strings and ethereal piano with an electronic bass, the score of “Severance” pushes the action forward in its underscoring, instilling at times dread, fear, joy, freedom and horror.
Everybody that worked on this show put an immense amount of work and care into their department. Even the lamps in the show are properly 60s-inspired to match the show’s aesthetic and reflect the show’s themes of isolation, love and pain.
In a world of profit-driven, soulless content, “Severance” is a unique work of art with a unique style and something profound to say.
“Severance” was confirmed to have a third season on March 21, with Erickson writing in a Reddit post that he’d be interested in either three or six seasons. “There’s a plan for the overall narrative but it’s flexible enough that it could work at different lengths,” he said.
“Severance” is streaming on AppleTV+.
