‘They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it...’
Has any other TV program captured the drudgery of working life more presciently than Severance? We live in a time of incredible technological development that should mean that people are spending less time at work than ever. Instead, we are working more than ever, but much of what we do is utterly pointless. Capitalism dictates that employers will wring every last drop out of their employees whether it benefits the company or not. As a teacher, much of what I do has a tangible sense of worth, but even my profession contains the faint whiff of pointless bureaucracy from time to time. At its best, Severance captures that feeling of drifiting futility and combines it with some good old-fashioned Lynchian surrealism to create something genuinely unique…
Season 1 ended with our four innies (Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry)) breaking out into the ‘real’ world and learning the truth about who each of them really are. Season 2 begins with Lumin dealing with the fallout from this incident. All the severed employees apart from Mark have been replaced. Miss Huang, a new deputy manager (and also inexplicably a child) has been appointed. Mr Milchick (Tramell Tillman) is now running the severed floor. But has Lumin really changed?
As the season progresses, the status quo eventually returns, with Mark being reunited with his fellow innies while his outie continues to try and solve the mystery that is Lumin with the help of his sister, Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander). I previously mentioned David Lynch and the plotting here is very reminiscint of Twin Peaks. Every time one mystery is solved, two more emerge in its place. This could make for a frustrating expereince if the acting and general mood of the piece were not so compelling.
There are three standout episodes here. Woe’s Hollow, episode 4, sees the gang embark on a team building exercise on a frozen lake; in Sweet Vitriol, we learn the truth about Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and her origins with Lumin; and finally, in the season finale, the conflict between the two sides of Mark’s personality is finally resolved. All in all, it’s a strong season of television that retains the eccentricities of the first season without just being weird for the sake of it. Merritt Wever is a fine addition to the cast as Dylan’s wife (in the outside world at least), and Christopher Walken continues to knock it out of the park as Irving’s long lost lover, Burt. It’s all strong stuff.
I was dismayed to hear that there is to be third season. For my money, the final scene here is the perfect ending for a show that has redefined what a TV show can be. While I trust that showrunner Dan Erickson and his team wouldn’t move forward with season three if they didn’t have something special up their sleeves, there is a nagging feeling that they’ll never top the conclusion that they present here.
Irregardless of those reserverations, however, there is no denying that season two successfully builds on the world created in the first season whilst still retaining everything that made season one so special. Wherever Severance goes from here, it has marked itself out as one of the best TV shows of the 21st century.
