Severance: When Work-Life Balance Gets Drilled Into Your Head

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

In the last couple of decades, the notion of work-life balance was seriously undermined by 24-hour digital accessibility before being completely broken by work-from-home COVID lockdowns.

All this makes Severance — a smart, absurdist nine-part dystopian series on Apple TV+ — feel uncomfortably immediate. This house-of-mirrors effect of this dramedy, which plays like a combination of Mike Judge’s Office Space by way of George Orwell’s 1984, comes to us through a big data and technology company.

Created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, the series stars Adam Scott as Mark, a middle-management archivist in a company called Macrodata Refinement, a department in Lumen Industries, in a building full of long white hallways and windowless rooms and a “break room” where employees go for obligatory therapy.

In Mark’s department, four employees who sit in cubicles in low-ceiling white rooms (the evocation of Billy Wilder’s dark workplace comedy The Apartment can’t be accidental) where they click numbers from arrays on their computer screens, according to their emotional reactions. They have no idea what information they are removing.

Instead of complicated non-disclosure agreements, the company offers employees a perfect firewall between their private and work lives: A metal brain implant that splits their memories between work experiences and their outside lives.

Once they pass through the company doors, they become new people. Only their outside selves can make decisions; inside, they’re slaves to the system. For Mark, who lost his wife in a car crash three years before, the effect works as an emotional anesthetic, though his equanimity has been shaken by the abrupt departure of his best friend, Petey (Yul Vasquez).

The co-workers, include Irving (John Turturro), a fuss-pot devotee to the company’s 19th century founder, Kier Eagan, and his quasi-religious mythology of self-reliance (a credible-sounding mishmash of Steve Jobs, Andrew Carnegie, and L. Ron Hubbard). There’s Dylan (Zach Cherry), superficially cynical but devoted to winning the company’s trivial perks and performance rewards.

For newcomer Helly (Brit Lower), who doesn’t remember agreeing to the process, the experience is a nightmare from which she cannot escape. The initial episodes focus on Mark’s attempts to train Helly, who we first meet as she is lying on a boardroom table with no memory, while Mark’s voice, via an intercom, conducts a brief survey to determine whether her mind-wipe has been complete.

We also meet Mark’s “outie” self, a chronically depressed widower who drinks a lot and lives alone in the snowbound town of Kier, where Lumen is the main industry. He has a somewhat fractious relationship with his over-friendly neighbour (Patricia Arquette who, unknown to both of them, is also his ice-cold boss at work). His pregnant sister (Jen Tullock) worries about him, and her self-help guru husband (Tramell Tillman) has a deep skepticism about the Severance program.

True to the genre’s conventions, there has to be one individual who breaks the divide between the two realities. As one episode slides into the next, the complexities of so many characters with double lives grows exponentially. (Full disclosure: I’m finished only five of the nine episodes, but I already feel like I might need to create a flowchart).

The cumulative effect is fascinating, exhausting and uncomfortably familiar. What struck me is how persuasively the series depicts a state which the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler associated with identifying schizophrenia, called “double book-keeping.”

It’s the idea that sufferers simultaneously live in two disjointed worlds, the social experience and the delusional one. It hits home and also at work. No wonder conspiracy theories are flourishing. No wonder so many people who can’t leave their homes are leaving their jobs instead.

Severance. Created by Dan Erickson. Directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle. Starring Adam Scott, with Zach Cherry, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, John Turturro, Patricia Arquette, and Christopher Walken. Now available on Apple TV+.