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Is ‘Severance’ about to split our loyalty in two? | John Moore | Arts & Entertainment

Is ‘Severance’ about to split our loyalty in two? | John Moore | Arts & Entertainment

(Editor’s note: This column explores plot points from Season 1 of “Severance,” which has been streaming for three years. It reveals no spoilers for the upcoming Season 2.)







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“Severance” finally returns to Apple TV+ on Friday, and I’m terrified. Not because it’s a particularly scary television show (beyond its unsettling dystopian premise).

Season 1 of “Severance” was pretty much perfect. Starting with an opening scene that was, itself, pretty perfect.

And now I’m terrified they are going to mess it up.

That first episode begins with an overhead shot looking down on an unconscious young woman incongruously splayed atop a conference-room table. She’s alone, looking like maybe she passed out at the office Christmas party the night before. But that’s not this work world. In this weird, “Pleasantville” kind of a work world, we’ll soon learn that cutting loose here means you’ve earned a waffle party – or perhaps three minutes of defiant jazz dancing.

When a disembodied male voice comes out of a small speaker on the table asking, “Who are you?” it is perhaps the greatest establishing opening line to any TV show in recent memory.

Who are you, indeed?

This woman has no idea. When she’s told her delicious name is “Helly R.,” it’s plain that she’s woken up in, yes, her own personal “Hell.” (One, it will turn out, of her own making.) And in this one scene, Britt Lower delivers a performance that will be studied in acting classes for a generation.







Severance Britt Lower on the table

The opening look at Season 1 of ‘Severance,’ with Britt Lower waking up on a conference-room table not knowing her identity. Season 2 starts Jan. 17 on Apple TV+.




This story, created by Dan Erickson and directed (mostly) by the ever-impressive Ben Stiller, places us in a very near future where a bizarro corporation called Lumon Industries has developed a brain implant that allows unhappy people to willingly have their work and personal lives surgically divided – or, “severed.” All it takes is a little cranial drilling and a chip insertion, and the severed person now essentially lives two separate lives – one by his worker “innie,” the other by his real-world “outie.” And never the twain shall meet. 

For example, our grief-stricken lead character, Mark – played with surgical precision (yes, I went there) by Adam Scott – agreed to have the procedure after the death of his wife. By night, sad outie Mark wallows in endless quiet pain and drunken guilt. By day, chipper innie Mark is a rising office manager whose team takes on meaningless tasks in an absurdly banal work environment, blissfully unaware for eight hours a day of any outside torment or hardship.     







Severance Apple TV

Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, John Turturro and Britt Lower in ‘Severance,’ returning to Apple TV+ with Season 2 on Jan. 17.




Likewise, the severance procedure presumably appeals to those who literally want nothing more than to leave their work at the office. So much so that, on the outside, none of these people know what they do for a living. Which, for the most part, is performing mundane tasks while being observed like lab rats.

Season 1 of “Severance” slowly unfolds like an endlessly fascinating symphony of expert storytelling. The journey for the audience, of course, starts with getting to know the players and trying to solve the ground rules for this strange yet uncomfortably familiar world. Throughout the season, we slowly discover our two Marks and the people who make up his separate worlds. The fun is trying to keep up as his inside and outside worlds slowly collide.

“Severance” is a popcorn sci-fi mystery of the highest order. It is also an exaggerated allegory of conformity. It is also a potent commentary on our universally identifiable failed pursuit of a work-life “balance.” One powerful subplot involving two of the great actors of our time – Christopher Walken and John Turturro – mirrors the complexities of burgeoning queer relationships in rigid corporate environments.

But the narrative goes into warp drive in the season-ending ninth episode, which has to rank among the greatest all-time single hours of television. In it, Mark and his three work buddies discover a subversive way to gain their first glimpses into their outside lives. All while being pursued by their monster of a boss, played with enigmatic finesse by Patricia Arquette in a creepy, career-making role.







Harmony Cobel and Seth Milchick in Severance

Patricia Arquette and Tramell Tillman as the management overlords in ‘Severance,’ returning to Apple TV+ with Season 2 on Jan. 17.


Season 1 has left many fundamental questions yet to be answered, which bodes well for the series’ return on Friday. One among them: What is up with Lumon, how does it make its money, and how does severing people’s brains factor into that profit plan? (It’s been speculated that Lumon is based on a real Swiss cosmetics firm called Weleda, founded in 1921 by an eccentric Austrian occultist who claimed to have invented a new synthesis of science and spirituality based on “The Four Temperaments.”) And, seriously: What is up with all those goats?

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But the writers allowed our four working stiffs to taste so much from the tree of knowledge in Season 1 that … well, that’s where my present terror about Season 2 stems from. 







Severance Goat Department

Seriously, ‘Severance’: What is up with all the goats?




The buildup to the heart-pounding Season 1 finale climaxes with a cutoff ending that makes all other cliffhangers seem like gentle, rolling slopes. It ends with Helly committing an extreme act of self-sabotage against her outie. Turturro and Walken’s characters, so clearly into each other at work, are just about to meet on the outside. And innie Mark has just discovered the ground-shaking truth about his wife and is screaming, “She’s alive!” in the direction of his sister just as we cut to credits. Surely followed by gasps of “Nooooo!” in tens of thousands of basements around the world. The show earned every one of its 14 Emmy nominations. But that was nearly three years ago. That’s an awfully long time to make us wait for whatever comes next.

How can Season 2 possibly live up to the promise of that finale? Expectations are sky-high.

I haven’t seen any advance episodes of Season 2, but Apple TV’s endless promotional teasers already make it plain that this astonishingly original series that took nothing but bold steps forward in Season 1 is about to take one giant step backward to start Season 2.

Obstacles are about to be put into play that will certainly bring the momentum of the series to a screeching halt. Based on the trailers, “Severance” appears to be soon joining the long list of promising TV series that perhaps never knew they were going to survive Season 1, so they extend the life of the story by pulling back and drawing things out endlessly.







AppleTV Severance Season 2

Britt Lower and Adam Scott have a weird, burgeoning attraction in ‘Severance,’ returning to Apple TV+ with Season 2 on Jan. 17.




All this audience wants is to see these characters taste free air, confront their original choices and (perhaps) restore their divided lives. The previews for Season 2, however, make it plain: Not so fast.

The official line from Apple TV+: “In season 2, Mark and his friends learn the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe.”

Trifling?  

Translation: The creators of “Severance” are about to take everything that was great about the first scene and that first season – and they are going to walk it all back.

Further evidence: In that same Season 2 preview, Arquette’s character, a boss lady named Harmony Corbel on the inside, turns Wicked Witch of the West in promising: “Oh, Mark, there will be no honeymoon ending for you.” (Cue the cackling.) 

Translation: We’re in for about 10 steps backward before we take another step forward. And that will test the patience of an increasingly impatient television-viewing audience who have been known to turn on a dime when a favorite show steps off the gas and starts dragging things out.

Anyone remember the catastrophic fall of “Twin Peaks”? David Lynch created a cultural phenomenon in 1990 with his masterfully bizarre eight-episode first season. And by the time we finally learned who killed Laura Palmer in that bloated, 22-episode second season – no one cared. Not one bit.

Visions of “Westworld’s” convoluted second season. That completely unnecessary sophomore season of the great “13 Reasons Why.” “The Walking Dead,” “Glee” and “Stranger Things” were all taken to the woodshed for their creatively lost second seasons. For more current examples, look no further than the disaster that is unfolding right now on the utterly dull second season of Apple TV’s thriller-turned-yawner, “Silo.”

Will “Severance” break the second-season curse? It does not look promising, but there is at least one reason for hope: Perhaps taking a cue from “Seinfeld” and “Frasier,” Season 2 will introduce something of an alternate version of our starting four. About one second of that troubling Season 2 trailer reveals that one of those new actors is Alia Shawkat, known to some for “Arrested Development” but more recently the undisputed breakout star of Hulu’s “The Old Man.” Which, ironically just got canceled – after its conversely staggering second season. 

I’ll be watching on Friday with both trepidation and hope that these writers don’t trifle with us for too long, or this Music Dance Experience is officially cancelled.

Is it a deal? A handshake is available upon request.

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