Two years into a pandemic, you would be forgiven for believing that the science-fiction aspect of Apple TV+’s “Severance” is that it involves people working side by side in an office.
But for the cubicle mates of the thrilling and loopily inventive “Severance,” created by Dan Erickson and produced and partly directed by Ben Stiller, the arrangement isn’t just ordinary. It’s the only life they’ve ever known.
The employees of the macrodata refinement department of Lumon Industries, led by Mark Scout (Adam Scott), have all agreed to undergo surgery to partition the work and personal sectors of their brains.
When each of them enters the office, a work self, or “innie,” becomes conscious and clocks in. Come quitting time, the out-of-office self, or “outie,” takes over and goes home, retaining no memory of life on the job. Think of it as a neurological mullet: business in the frontal lobe, party in the back.
Sweet deal, right? No more balancing work and personal life, no more bringing office stress home, no more Monday-morning dread. It could be bliss, for one of you at least.
As for Lumon’s employees — well, they are of two minds.
At the start of “Severance,” which begins Friday, the staffers work contentedly in their retro-minimalist office, sorting numbers on computer terminals. They fit neat workplace-sitcom archetypes: Irving (John Turturro), the starchy veteran; Dylan (Zach Cherry), the cynical wisecracker; and Mark, the nice guy struggling with the responsibilities he inherited when the former team leader (Yul Vazquez) suddenly vanished. (Sounds significant; it is.)
Their arrangement is shaken with the arrival of a new colleague, Helly (Britt Lower), who wakes on a conference table in an amnesiac stupor. (“Am I dead?” she asks. “Am I livestock?”) After she makes a brief, slapstick-violent attempt to flee, Mark explains that she is there of her own free will — “her” meaning her outie version, whose permission Helly would need in order to quit. Anyway, as Mark notes, “Quitting would effectively end your life, insomuch as you’ve come to know it.”
There’s something different about Helly, whom Lower plays with a nervy intensity. She does not become a team player, despite training, bonding exercises and threats of the “break room” (the first word of which, at Lumon, is more verb than noun). She’s an irritant. Over an engrossing season, she prompts itches in her co-workers that lead them to wonder about their top-secret work and their outside lives, and to rebel.
The forces against them include their deadpan, terrifying boss, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette); politicians who are pushing to broaden the use of severance technology; and, in a way, their out-of-office selves.
Sci-fi stories about altered consciousness, from “They Live” to “The Matrix” to “Homecoming,” often involve people having their minds tinkered with by aliens or evil institutions. “Severance” asks whether, given an incentive, you would subjugate a part of yourself, outsourcing your drudgery to another you, like Homer Simpson deferring his problems to “Future Homer.” (“Man, I don’t envy that guy!”)
Playful and mordantly funny, “Severance” is like a Charlie Kaufman-designed nightmare, from the midcentury-menacing set to the way it sketches the innies’ hermetic lives. They walk through the elevator doors at quitting time, then immediately back in to start the day, as if someone has snipped off the rest of life and twisted the remainder into a Möbius strip.
Undergirding the fun-house surrealism is the series’s feel for the soft tyrannies of the modern workplace. Troubled workers get a session with a “wellness” counselor (Dichen Lachman), who calms them with soothing trivia about outie life. The creepily cheerful H.R. rep/minder, Milchick (Tramell Tillman), bestows minor perks like a five-minute dance session or a “waffle party,” a goofy reward that becomes poignant when you realize the innies’ days eternally begin after breakfast and end before dinner.
The series’s tone and palette shift when we leave the office with Mark, who, we learn, volunteered for severance after losing his wife. For him, the operation is a means of creating a grief-free second self. Scott’s features transform when Mark shifts to outie mode, his face deflating like a flat tire.
Mark’s home life is not without drama; unbeknown to him, since he has no memory of the office, Harmony lives next door, surveilling him in the guise of a dotty neighbor. But maybe because of his sad-sack bearing (Scott feels more alive in the role of droll office guy, as in “Parks and Recreation”), the outside scenes drag, with a wintry pall that matches Mark’s gloom. Lumon may be a high-tech gulag, but it is by far the more fun place to spend time as a viewer.
The nine-episode season suffers from streaming slump in the middle, but it hooks you early and accelerates late, as the data crunchers learn more about Lumon and its other departments. (Turturro’s Irving strikes up a sweet flirtation with a courtly associate played by Christopher Walken.) It all builds to a tense, stupendous season finale that feels like a racecar hurtling toward a brick wall, in the best way.
The premise of “Severance” might appear superficially to be out of step with the times. After all, months of Slack huddles and Zoom meetings have fuzzed the boundaries between work and home, not carved them with a scalpel. But the story is perfectly timed for a moment when, through the stresses and disruptions of the pandemic, workers have been confronting what they’re asked to give of themselves for a paycheck. This may be the first great TV show of the Great Resignation.
There are also hints that severance might have applications beyond the workplace, which holds promise for future seasons. How many unpleasant aspects of life might people like to outsource to another version of themselves — or even to make someone else forget, with the aid of a little brain snip? What kind of heaven could you live in if your alter ego could, like Persephone, do the time in hell?
In fact, “Severance” rings so true as a parable of modern life that it feels like a slight misstep for the series to depict Lumon the way it does — as a kind of cult, with a fanatical devotion to its 19th-century founder and his quasi biblical aphorisms. (“Let not weakness live in your veins.”)
As we know from reality, it doesn’t take a monstrously aberrant organization to abuse productivity-enhancing technology. It’s just business.
