'Severance' among best of 2022 shows

I'm starting 2023 by recommending a streaming series I was remiss in not reviewing in 2022, even though it was easily one of the best TV shows of last year.

"Severance" was the show that persuaded me to subscribe to Apple+, and not only is its first season still available on the streaming service, but it's been confirmed to receive a second season this year.

"Severance" is like Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" if it was remade for the post-COVID era.

In an unnamed wintery state, the Eagan business family dominates the landscape, not just through the megalithic headquarters for the Eagans' company, Lumon Industries, but also to the point that various area locales are named after their family.

Beneath the towering Lumon Industries building lies a labyrinthine subterranean workplace facility of oversized offices stocked with oddly antiquated desktop computers, and even more voluminous production and manufacturing spaces, that manage to feel both industrial and clinically antiseptic.

The cubicle drones of what Lumon calls its "Macrodata Refinement" division crunch numbers they don't understand, for reasons they're never told. Meanwhile, the labcoat-clad engineers and developers of Lumon's "Optics and Design" division churn out everything from painstakingly detailed corporate propaganda artwork, bordering on religious idolatry, to seemingly random tools and trinkets, with no clue as to their possible broader purpose.

Lumon seems to produce everything and nothing, and its employees are forbidden from making maps of their own workplace's virtually endless hallways, whose motion-sensing lights ensure those halls grow darker the longer they're disused. A pair of wandering workers discover an isolated department staffed by a single employee, whose sole function is to feed baby goats.

Lumon is so secretive, it's pioneered a "severance" program that separates its employees' working and nonworking memories, so employees can't remember anything they do at work, and when they're at work, they can't remember any aspect of their lives outside of Lumon.

Should I have led with that existentially terrifying premise?

"Severance" feels like the dark dream of modern tech executives come true. What better way to preclude the complaints of worker bees who want to telecommute from home than to ensure they forget all their workplace miseries as soon as they're off the clock for the day?

The show's aesthetic reads at least partially like a satire of the Steve Jobs era of Apple - ironically enough, given the streaming service that's hosting it - while also drawing from the zeitgeist of the 1970s and '80s, as well as a Soviet Bloc coldness.

Sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, whose stories became the basis for "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall," would have loved how "Severance" plays with the nature of how memory affects identity. The Lumon employees are depicted as becoming practically different people at work, versus at home, to the degree that one disgruntled worker plots against her off-hours self, who in turn treats her own workplace self like a slave, and less than human.

The cast is impeccable. Adam Scott transforms his comically sedate bewilderment from "Parks and Recreation" into a depressed yet resigned weariness that I suspect will feel uncomfortably familiar to those who have weathered stretches in their lives when simply waking up was a slog.

Patricia Arquette is as compelling and forbidding as Cate Blanchett's Galadriel, in playing the core characters' ruthlessly duplicitous boss, and Tramell Tillman is intimidatingly insincere in his plastic positivity as the floor supervisor for the "severed" employees.

This is the first role I've seen Tillman in, but his fixed grin and artificially forced casualness are chilling recreations of every middle manager who makes a performance out of wanting to be his workers' "friend."

Britt Lower delivers another standout performance from an actor with whom I was previously unfamiliar, as the appropriately nicknamed "Helly," a new hire in Lumon's Macrodata Refinement division, whose war between her "innie" and "outie" selves takes on nationwide political stakes when her secrets are revealed.

John Turturro and Christopher Walken are deservedly known for their dramatic excesses as actors, and while their characters share a humorous meticulousness in "Severance," the mutual attraction that grows from this trait is understated and genuinely moving, especially when they're confronted with the implications of "retirement" for "severed" employees, whose workplace selves essentially cease to exist.

What's most harrowing and hilarious all at once is how the show's most absurd aspects are also the most grounded in the emerging realities of too many modern workplaces. Lumon's approach to HR fully qualifies as psychological torture, which it pairs with patronizing "rewards" for jobs well done, from desktop trophies to "office parties" that merely underscore the amount of time employees spend in the office.

Be warned that "Severance" juggles multiple mysteries, enough that even an attentive viewer might require a scorecard to keep them straight, and its first season concludes on a cliffhanger.

But what's been hinted at has been more than enough to keep my interest engaged, and what's disclosed by the end of the first season makes it worth your while to watch it more than once.

Moving onto the reader participation portion of this column, the post-New Year winter months are always a bit lean for new onscreen entertainment, and that looks to be especially true this year. So, just as you helpfully chimed in with your preferences about whether I should watch more big-screen or streaming content, so too will I now ask for your suggestions about any films or TV shows in particular that you believe I should be watching.

With any luck, we might both discover something fun and new.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]