The office has been the setting of many shows, but the workplace of Apple TV +’s Severance is like nothing you’ve seen before on television. It has much more in common with Terry Gilliam’s Brazil than Dunder Mifflin. The series, created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, makes the office look like a newly discovered ring of hell, where liminality is used to torture its inhabitants instead of fire and brimstone. Maybe limbo would be a better description, a place of uncertainty, transition, and neglect.
Severance stars Adam Scott as Mark, a depressed widow who works as a team leader on the so-called “severed floor” at the fictional Lumen Industries. When Mark and his co-workers, played by Zach Cherry, Britt Lower, and John Turturro, go into the office, they forget everything about their lives on the outside. When they leave at the end of the day, they forget everything that happened in the office. This split between their work and personal lives gives each of the characters two distinct personalities; an “innie” who is stuck in the office and an “outie” who has no knowledge of the work they do every day. Leading this severed team are their boss, Harmony Cobel, played by Patricia Arquette, and terrifying office supervisor Milchick, played by Tramell Tillman.
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While most shows about the office are sitcoms, Severance takes a decidedly different approach, showing just how horrific a workplace can be. While it’s often darkly humorous, the show is more of a depressing psychological thriller with a satirical bent than a broad comedy. As many of us emerge out of the work-from-home lifestyle and return to the office, now is the perfect time to explore what the sardonic and chilling Severance has to say about work-life balance.
Severance: Surgical Split
Apple TV+
The science-fiction device at the core of Severance is so ingenious that it’s almost hard to believe that it hasn’t been used before. At one point or another, everyone wished they could just skip to the end of the workday. Dan Erickson created a world where that is possible through the severance procedure. The surgery basically creates a worker who cannot leave the office by inserting a capsule in-between the two halves of the brain. It would be easy to blame Lumen Industries’s employees for participating in this practice, but the company’s executives and complicit government are truly to blame. The offer to get a paycheck without working is an offer that would be hard to turn down, even if it hurt someone else. Performing any job has negative externalities, so what makes getting severed that much worse than, say, depending on child labor abroad, to give an extreme example? It’s impossible to exist in the modern world without hurting others, despite our best efforts.
The show’s depiction of work is relatable, regardless of the severance procedure’s fictional status. The feeling of being stuck at the office is a familiar one, even if it’s not as literal as the experience of Mark and his coworkers. Even when you do get to go home, the knowledge that tomorrow means another day of work can make it feel like the break is meaningless, that you are “living to work” instead of “working to live.” Working from home hasn’t made things better either. The lack of a formal boundary between your job and home life can make it much more difficult to ever truly be off the clock. The same goes for participating in the gig economy. While Severance specifically showcases the grim reality of modern workspaces, its relevance isn’t confined to the office, unlike its main characters.
Severance: Inhospitable Interiors
Like the titular abode from Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the severed floor of Lumen Industries is like a living organism, a monstrous cosmic horror beyond human understanding. Shot with wide lenses and from uncomfortable angles and distances, the office that serves as the main setting of Severence is both familiar yet haunting. It is recognizably an office, but nothing about it makes sense. For example, the Macrodata Refinement division, where the show’s main characters work, is only four desks. However, they are in an immense room that could fit another twenty employees without getting crowded. Hilariously, despite the gargantuan space, they have short dividers in between their desk, which provide no actual privacy.
Little touches like this and more noticeable aspects, like the office’s sickly color palette, create an atmosphere of extreme discomfort. The directors, Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, along with the production design and camera teams, have done a fantastic job of making an instantly unpleasant space.
Severance’s core concept and execution, along with the show’s genius use of space and set design, have genuinely captured how isolating and dehumanizing it can be to work in an office, especially at a colossal corporation like Lumen Industries. The characters’ innies don’t even know what they are doing all day, isolating numbers that elicit odd feelings for an unknown reason. Despite this obfuscation, the employees still have to go through the severance procedure and sell a piece of them as a wage worker who doesn’t even see the fruits of their labor. Anything that could lead to better conditions, like solidarity and unionization, is quelled through intimidation, torture, and this supposed work-life balance solution. Like all good satire, Severance exaggerates the horrors of the office to demonstrate the terrifying nature of the real workplace.
