In the Dark Reviews

If you're into brain-bending dystopian mystery series on streaming, not only has Apple TV+ brought back the darkly satiric workplace-based "Severance" for a second season, but Hulu has debuted the political thriller "Paradise." After four episodes of each, I'm hooked.

"Severance" delivered a top-flight first season with a crackerjack ensemble cast, and its follow-up thus far has managed to avoid the "sophomore slump" that a number of nonformulaic shows can struggle with. "Paradise," meanwhile, has hit the ground running with successive revelations to sustain its audience's engagement by the closing credits of each new episode.

It's telling both shows share the 1967 British cult classic "The Prisoner" as an evolutionary antecedent. They're each set in an artificially isolated and cryptic community.

"Severance" comes closer to the experimentalism of Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" and David Lynch and Mark Frost's "Twin Peaks," though filtered through an aesthetic that's equally Mike Judge's "Office Space" and the internet meme "The Backrooms."

By contrast, "Paradise" plays out a premise similar to "Fallout," but as a more conventionally safe, straight-faced, Tom Clancy-style slick military-industrial nuts-and-bolts caper.

"Paradise" is the more carefully calculated commercial product, with scenes taking place before and after a still-ambiguously established world-changing event, whose action kicks off when a U.S. president, who appears to have recently completed two terms, is found murdered in the cloistered, well-manicured neighborhood to which he's retired.

"Paradise" benefits from its trio of key players; James Marsden as the schmoozy but complicated president, Sterling K. Brown as the impeccably ethical Secret Service agent assigned to the president's personal detail, and Julianne Nicholson as the steely self-made billionaire whom the president alternately leans on and comes into conflict with.

Nicholson, in particular, has come a long way since playing the waifish Detective Megan Wheeler on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" from 2006 to 2009, and her character on "Paradise" is terrifyingly formidable. Brown also proves his leading-man chops, and Marsden does an effortlessly effective job of conveying the prickly layers underlying a seemingly shallow man.

"Severance" is more unafraid to fly without a net, using the ethical dubiousness of its far-flung sci-fi premise (what if you could sever your memories of your work hours from your time away from the office?) as a springboard for an assortment of even more outlandish plot threads.

Adam Scott infuses his "Parks & Rec" persona with a darkly dramatic heft for "Severance," holding his own against the intensity of established character actors Patricia Arquette, John Turturro and Christopher Walken, who are joined this season by so-far all-too-brief appearances by prestige TV performers Gwendoline Christie and Merritt Wever.

But it's the returning Tramell Tillman, as our fictional company's menacing, formally mannered, midlevel executive, who's the secret weapon of "Severance," personifying the ominous absurdity of modern corporate culture's cultishly oppressive self-seriousness.

"Severance" has constructed a fascinatingly arcane and foreboding mythos around the inner workings of its literally labyrinthine workplace, and as many loose ends as I fear might

merely turn out to be red herrings, I need to see how many they can tie together into a coherent whole.

Unlike the Cylons in the 21st century revival of the "Battlestar Galactica" franchise, I trust that "Paradise" has worked out its master plan in advance - I've already been able to predict a number of its twists mere moments before they've been revealed.

But I couldn't even begin to guess where "Severance" might head. Each new direction it takes surprises me, enough that I wonder whether it might eventually produce its own equivalent to the mind-blowing "Episode 8" of 2017's "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Either way, I'm along for the ride until the wheels fall off of both shows.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
kboxleitner@masoncounty.com