I thought of Create the Escape a lot while I was watching the second season of AppleTV+’s beloved sci-fi series Severance. The show, created by Dan Erickson, occasionally has the flavor of a prestige-produced escape room. Every moment animated by questionable stakes that feel real in the moment but might be wholly imaginary; every plot development awaiting us on the other side of a puzzle; the feeling that some unseen somebody is off-screen laughing at the mayhem that ensues.
Severance follows a quartet of Innies—Mark (Adam Scott) and his colleagues Irving (John Turturro), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Helly (Britt Lower)—as the boundary between their lives inside Lumon and outside of it becomes more and more dangerously porous. When it premiered in 2022, it nimbly, and probably at least partially accidentally, attended to a wide variety of pandemic-era tensions and traumas. Mark, the show’s protagonist, decides to undergo the severance procedure in order to escape the grief he feels after the recent loss of his wife. It’s hard not to see how a show about the complexity of the grieving process, about alienation from labor, about the passive-aggressive intensity of being isolated with a pod of strangers, resonated with viewers at the time of its release. The season ended with our Innies, like us all, freshly awakened to the cruelties of a world they only half understood in the first place.
I’m of two minds about Severance. Severance, of course, is of two minds about itself. It may be a bit cute to put it this way, but there are indisputably two versions of this show, and they don’t always work together. On one hand, there’s the office satire, the dystopian corporate culture parody that serves as the show’s entry point. This version of Severance is fine as far as it goes, but it’s also a little bit repetitive, and occasionally a little bit stale. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999) and Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office (2001) set the terms for almost every contemporary office satire since. Severance shares their main features, with corporate drone office workers in nondescript cubicles overseen by mediocre middle managers on power trips, and with disingenuous, limply conceived efforts at promoting corporate “culture.”
It’s not that the critiques of office culture we see in Severance are wrong; it’s just that they are pretty predictable. The show endeavors to package these critiques, to trot out these tropes, in as winking a manner as possible—which only really serves to remind us of how pro forma this aspect of the show is. For all of its clever fillips around the conventions, this half of Severance is a fairly straightforward genre exercise.
This season, the sense of mystery deepens and expands. I can’t get enough of the lore about the company’s enigmatic founder, Kier Eagan, and while the show giddily draws on the histories of Mormonism and Scientology in crafting this founder’s narrative, there’s originality in the writing, including a particularly memorable new story about the harms of self-pleasure in the great outdoors. The new season digs into each of the aforementioned puzzles, while paying substantially more attention to the importance of the work the Innies are doing and demonstrating the lengths to which Lumon’s corporate overlords will go to see it completed. The show begins to explore the terrifying and tantalizing possibility of double agents, non-severed employees masquerading as severed ones. And, just as it did last season, Severance introduces several different visual mysteries—vistas that can’t seem to exist; uncanny apparitions—which add to both the mood and the narrative mystery of the show.
That is not to say that Severance doesn’t circle around big questions. A common reading, and one that’s obviously correct, is that Severance is about grief and grieving. Severance, the technique, is Mark’s attempt to short-circuit the grieving process, to distract himself, to create a self who’s never lost anything, who wouldn’t even know what that would feel like. But the show’s second season feels more obsessed than before about the idea of severance as a kind of death itself. The severed floor is somehow, all at once, a way to avoid thinking about death, a way of very directly thinking about death, and a technological advance that makes possible a new way of dying: The Innies have no connection to their outside lives or loved ones, but they also have new, severed lives that are precious and precarious themselves.
There are things happening in Severance that are conventional office satire; there are moments of jarringly deep existential wonderment; and there are big clumps of random, silly nonsense. These three modes don’t always hang together, but there is something daring about the attempt. For all its fun house distractions, Severance is not particularly subtle about its blunt fascination with death; everything in the show—from the “Music Dance Experience” on the inside to dinner parties with friends on the outside—serves only as temporary distraction from this fundamental, irresolvable mystery. It is occasionally frustrating to watch a show entirely constructed out of fake backdrops, layers of cartoony constructedness. But it can also be exhilarating in the brief moments when all those layers drop away, leaving the characters, and us along with them, in free fall.
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