Gen Z has been consuming media about villainous corporations since the days of Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated. “Severance,” an Apple TV sensation that is dominating social media feeds and puzzling minds, is the latest installment in this trend.
Directed and produced by Ben Stiller, “Severance” follows several Luman Corporation employees — Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lover), Irving (John Turturo) and Dylan (Zach Cherry) — who have undergone the severance procedure to split their consciousnesses into "outies" and "innies." Their “outies” are who they are outside of work, while their "innies" only exist inside the office. Each half knows nothing about what the other half feels or experiences.
While Lumon is publicly considered a medical technology company, its true purpose is wrapped in mystery. The severed employees the show follows — who work on the Macrodata Refinement and sort numbers into boxes based on the feelings they elicit — do not know their work's purpose.
Throughout season one, Mark collaborated with his colleagues to uncover the truth behind Lumon. They discovered a cultish devotion to the company’s founder Kier Egan (Marc Geller), a strange department that raises baby goats and an overtime contingency plan that would let the innies take over their bodies outside of work. The season finale revealed that Gemma (Dichen Lachman), Mark’s outie’s wife who supposedly died in a car accident, was secretly alive and working at Lumon under the alias Miss Casey.
Season two of the show started Jan. 17, with a new episode each Friday. The show gets more intense each episode, with many major plot developments after episode three, including Mark’s innie being reintegrated into his outie self.
From its dreary cinematography to its eerie acting, “Severance” is a uniquely terrifying show that creates fear by subverting a seemingly familiar reality and capitalizing on people's deepest fears about corporate nine-to-five jobs. The setting's dark and moody colors almost induce seasonal depression in viewers, and the bleak, repetitive task of sorting numbers into a computer is eerily similar to looking at spreadsheets all day.
Given the state of the world and the power corporations hold, the idea of a severance procedure does not seem that far off from reality. The goal of a company is to maximize profits, making severance an appealing corporate strategy, and severance is essentially an extreme version of the biohacking and Taylorist practices used to boost productivity and worker efficiency.
That's not the only scary parallel between "Severance" and today either. One of the unanswered questions of “Severance” concerns the purpose of characters who appear to be permanent innies, meaning that they never leave Lumon. Modern corporations also incentivize their employees to leave work as little as possible, adding office amenities like free food and game rooms to encourage their employees to stay later and work longer.
Shows like “Severance” or HBO Max’s “Succession” capitalize on the trope of the evil corporation, effectively capitalizing on negative public sentiment surrounding the immense power of transnational corporations and how these corporations exploit workers. In fact, "Severance" creator Dan Erickson came up with the show's premise while bored at different temp jobs, imagining an invention that would let him dissociate from his body during the workday to make work more bearable.
“Severance” is somehow both utterly unfathomable and grounded in reality. Through its hyperbole, some light is be shed on the harms and problems of the American corporate culture experience. Beyond the strength of its message, the show is also a strong, twist-packed viewing experience that everybody should watch.
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Olivia Prusky is a Trinity sophomore and a social media editor for Recess.