Office Party
Apple TV's Severance
This past winter treated television audiences to a slew of workplace shows, some dramas, others comedies. I wrote about Hulu’s The Dropout in these pages, a study in grift that starred Amanda Seyfried as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Its theme of the CEO as sociopath was imitated by two others: WeCrashed, from Apple TV, and Super Pumped, made by Showtime. The former chronicles the rise and fall of Adam Neumann (Jared Leto), founder of WeWork. The latter tells the similar saga of Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), former CEO of Uber. Neither matches the sophistication and intelligence of The Dropout. But both strove (like the Holmes dramatization) to present the ills of American capitalism as symptoms of pathological leadership. Social sin derives from personal sin, they suggested. Understand the psyche of the cult founder, and you’ll have all you need to know.
With their new Apple TV series, Severance, writer Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller offer a more expansive critique of labor practices, one that examines economic abuse not just as the product of a deranged individual, but as systemic exploitation. And it takes its perspective from below, not above—from the workers, not the boss. The show envisions the corporation as a totalitarian regime, a panopticon in which workers are prisoners with minds controlled by an unseen, omnipotent, sinister force. In its near-future, Adam Scott plays Mark, an employee at Lumon Industries, who’s undergone a medical procedure known as “severance.” This surgery split his mind such that while he’s at work in the company’s Macrodata Refinement division (MDR), he has no memory of his personal life. Likewise, as soon as he leaves the massive, grim headquarters, he loses all memories of his work self. He leads a dualistic existence, with a twin inhabiting him that he’s unaware of. What would drive someone to do this? In Mark’s case, the death of his wife two years prior and his unrelenting grief provided the motivation.
Mark works in an open-office cubicle alongside two other severed employees: Irving (John Turturro), docile, fastidious, and a stickler for company policy; and Dylan (Zach Cherry), an uncouth but sharp schlub who enjoys corporate perks and prizes. When the show opens, a new member of their team, Helly (Britt Lower), has just undergone the procedure. She wakes up on a table in an empty-boardroom, dazed and confused, and receives instructions over the intercom from a disembodied voice. Later, we see that the voice belongs to Mark, who observes from an adjacent room while himself being watched in the process.
Surveillance makes for the major motif of the show. The MDR’s behavior is videotaped by their un-severed boss, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who is also monitored: in her case, by a faceless Board that conference-calls in but speaks to her only via an assistant wearing an ear piece. Cobel, in turn, sends her non-severed underling, Milchick (Tramell Tillman), to discipline the employees. His tactics include carrots like the melon bar and the even-more-coveted egg bar; and sticks like verbal warnings and vists to Cobel’s office. The ultimate punishment is a trip to the “break room,” where he administers a psychological torture in which the subject reads a confession of guilt into a tape recorder over and over ad infinitum. On the other hand, to ensure compliance, Cobel schedules the workers for “wellness checks,” in which a robotic therapist, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), induces a kind of hypnosis in her seductive spa and reads them “facts” about the great life that they lead on the outside.
In reality, Mark’s external life is drab and dreary. He lives alone in sterile company row housing, and he almost never socializes. His only human contact comes from his sister, Devon (Jen Tullock), married to self-help guru Ricken (Michael Chernus) and about to give birth. Neither of them is severed, and they regard Mark’s decision with both tacit support and considerable anxiety. He wants to be a nobody, a non-entity, to numb himself from the pain of existence. Though unsure of what he does at his day job, he believes it’s benign—so what’s the harm in not knowing? Yet eventually he realizes there might be more than meets the eye: one night, a mysterious man appears in his driveway who claims to be his former co-worker, Petey (Yul Vazquez). He’s undergone a clandestine process of “reintegration,” he tells Mark, a secret procedure to un-severe his mind and stitch his self back together. But as he informs Mark about the nefarious treatment that their “innies” receive at work, he suffers a mental and physical collapse. This only sends Mark further down the rabbit hole to discover the truth of what goes on at Lumon.
In terms of genre, Severance is a mix of black comedy and psychological thriller, like The Twilight Zone meshed with Office Space. Erickson has no other credits to his name, so the imagination he displays with the script is all the more striking. He and Stiller borrow from many sources, including the dystopian sci-fi of P.D. James and Philip K. Dick. They build a meticulous world both inside and outside the walls of Lumon, one that you can’t quite place. Is this the future? The United States? Where exactly is the town? The creators unspool things like an onion as Mark and his team explore their environment both within and without. The MDR squad knows almost nothing of the company beyond their floor, and as the plot unfolds, they take expeditions to investigate other departments—such as Optics and Design (whose members, Dylan rumors, once led a mythic massacre of MDR) and the Perpetuity Wing, a wax museum and house that enshrines Lumon’s legendary founder, Kier Eagon. Oddly, these walks seem to take forever as they wander a maze of endless, empty corridors. The workspace lives in an ethereal realm, with minimalist, geometric decor out of the 1970s and rudimentary computers from the ‘80s.
With its motifs of spying, existentialism, and political-corporate conspiracy, the series also references the 1974 film The Conversation starring Gene Hackman as the spook Harry Caul. Its eerie piano theme derives heavily, in fact, from David Shire’s score of that masterful Francis Ford Coppola picture. Both films share several literary antecedents. From Melleville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, they convey the modern idea that we are our work. From Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, they borrow the ideas of an all-seeing eye and brainwashing. And with their depiction of an irrational world cloaked in a malevolent presence, they evoke Kafka. Even when he’s at work, Mark has no idea what the company does or the purpose of MDR itself—their obsessive, Pac-Man-esque task is simply to stare at digital numbers and delete those that trigger strong emotional reactions.
The show’s style takes on surreal elements as it unfolds. At one point, Helly and Mark stumble upon an unknown department where a bearded man in a suit feeds a herd of baby goats. “They’re not ready!” he yells at them as they stare, baffled. “You can’t take them!” In another episode, Dylan receives a “waffle party,” in which (after consuming said waffles) he dons a Kier Eagan puppet head, climbs into bed, and is treated to a bizarre erotic dance from masked performers. Elements of kink, BDSM, and the occult blend together in their display, its purpose unclear. Through its use of waking dreams, a dark social underbelly, and split personalities, the show also alludes to the work of David Lynch.
Unlike The Dropout, Severance gets at broader themes of how modern work alienates us: how the economy disrupts our lives, exploits our productive capacity, and even splits our personalities. It paints its firm as an authoritarian regime that seeks to dominate its employees on the deepest psychic and moral levels—a tyranny that arises not because of a single founder (although that’s part of the problem) but because of the town’s fundamental political-economic structures. Mark and the MDR team are Lumon’s slaves, in the end, and in their attempt to band together and "wake up" to overthrow their overlords, the show unwittingly introduces a critique of capitalism both Marxist and pseudo-gnostic. The fact that it was produced by Apple makes it all the more ironic.
But rather than engage in cheap didacticism, the creators engage the audience through deft psychological tension, polysemous symbols, and multiple meanings. No visual or dramatic element is without purpose, and the pleasure comes from the attempt to read through the hidden code. While most of the show takes place from Mark’s limited point of view, we get a glimpse of a broader web of darkness. It all builds to a propulsive season finale that truly stuns.
The cast ground the series with fine-tuned performances. Most viewers know Adam Scott from his bro-jerk takes in Parks and Recreation (2009-2015) and The Good Place (2016-2020). Here he offers completely different sides of himself: buttoned-up niceness at work and depressive-melancholic at home. As a young widower who strives for privacy, his subtle shifts and halting approach as Mark’s “outie” draw you in. As Dylan, Zach Cherry adds punchy comic relief and a chummy quality that turns heroic. Britt Lower has an air of high comedy about her, appropriate for a woman who, we learn, is a socialite. Turturro adopts a clipped, proper speech pattern for Irving that—with his sweater vests—heightens the man’s exacting ways.
Irving develops a surreptetious relationship with Burt of O&D, and it’s unclear if the homoerotic overtones imply some partnership from their past or in the outside world. (The “outie” consciousness starts to invade the experience of several MDR members as the show progresses.) Christopher Walken plays Burt, and the two veteran performers—with their uncanny, relaxed ability to act in the moment—turn what could be pat encounters into something real. Arquette draws her Cobel character too broadly, unfortunately, and strays into ham-bone territory. But Tillman portrays Milchick with a mercurial, creepy performance that goes a long way to establish the show’s outré atmosphere. When he offers the MDR team a “music dance experience,” (which, again, feels out of the ‘70s) Stiller adopts a subjective camera for the sequence that underscores Milchick’s Nurse Ratched quality from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).
Stiller’s best work as a director remains his 2013 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which also examines a corporate cog who tries to breaks out of his dead-end life. That picture was a fantasy, though, with a brightness that stands in stark contrast to the tone and mood of Severance. The series was filmed and released during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it makes for a prescient observation of a time when the work-life balance collapsed for millions—physically, psychologically, and spiritually. To many workers, the experience of not having to report like drones to a petty dictatorship (i.e., the office) was a revelation. For the many more who were not allowed to go home, the impersonal manner in which they were sent to the front lines of a pandemic—while their white-collar colleagues worked remotely—confirmed their sense that, in the eyes of capitalists, the lives of everyday wage-earners are expendable.
In both cases, the crisis was epiphanic. The New York Times ran a fascinating opinion piece recently about Severance, which details the myriad ways companies are trying to lure employees back to the office. In light of a million American COVID dead, their incentives have the hollow ring of Lumon Industries. Workers have seen through the facade, and are entertaining other arrangements. Maybe we don’t have to sell our time and energy to undemocratic, uncaring behemoths that dictate our movements, constrain our choices, and govern our habits with nearly unchecked authority. Maybe we don’t have to shut off our brain and endure the daily grind. Maybe this whole labor system is arbitrary and, at bottom, perverse. With their compulsive, mind-bending show, Stiller and company suggest there’s untapped potential in us all—and a better way to organize society.