Apple TV+Apple TV+’s surreal workplace show was a hit when it premiered in 2022. And from the playful storytelling to the layered performances, there’s a lot to savor.
In the second season of Severance, a character spends hours practicing how to properly attach a paper clip (apparently there’s a right way and a wrong way). Other characters find a room full of goats in an office building, or someone finds a working phone booth on the street outside the office, as if it were a daily occurrence. But viewers of Season 1 of this series, one of the bravest and most imaginative in recent years, know that its bizarre world can resonate even with anyone who’s ever been bored at work.
A perfect balance of reality and surreality, the show follows four employees at Lumon Industries who choose to have a chip implanted in their brains that sorts the numbers floating on their computer screens and cuts their memories in half. Masu. The people who work in the office, called “innies,” don’t know who they are on the other side of the wall. Additionally, responders outside the office, or “outees,” have no memory of the workday. Identity crisis alone doesn’t begin to explain it. The show’s creator, Dan Erickson, inspired This is a work in which he hoped that the monotonous office work he did when he was an unsuccessful screenwriter would go by smoothly as if nothing had happened, and his idea of being able to turn off the brain was based on information overload. This is particularly relevant in today’s world.
This twist on the familiar office show setting serves as a major hook. But the true alchemy of this series, and the secret to its success and acclaim, is how well it builds emotional attachment to the characters of Lumon’s Macro Data Improvement Division, who realize they’ve made a terrible mistake. There’s something about it. The cast makes them very believable, including the grieving widow Mark (Adam Scott), the fussy, lovesick Irving (John Turturro), the rebellious Helly (Britt Lauer), And it’s easy to empathize with the unattended Dylan (Zach Cherry) who works in the office. He looked unhappy until he did. While some series radically change things between seasons, this is a seamless continuation, with the same magic working in even more heart-wrenching turns.
The story begins five months after the cliffhanger we last saw. Dylan remains at Lumon Industries, struggling to hold down a switch that allows him to briefly access his work memories while the other three are out. Mark realizes that his wife Gemma may actually be alive and is the person he unknowingly encountered at work. Irv is an artist who, for some reason, has documents about Lumon employees hidden in his apartment. What is most surprising of all is that Helly is Helena Egan, the heir to LeMont’s fortune, who went through a process called “severance” to publicly demonstrate her faith in LeMont.
They return to the office with all their knowledge, but the storytelling is trickier and more playful. Since the beginning of the show, we’ve seen both the innie world and the outie world, so we knew more about the characters than they knew about themselves. But this season, we’re less sure of some characters’ motivations than we were before, or as much as we thought we were. What are they doing, what are they hiding, and are they as united as they seem? Everyone becomes an unreliable narrator, at least for a while, which cleverly adds suspense.
Some are the same. Scott is still grieving as Mark, an out-type who is so grieved by the loss of his wife that he files for divorce to escape the pain of that memory for part of the day. . And like a disillusioned Innie Mark, his sarcastic rebuttals to his superiors arrive with razor clarity.
Apple TV+Lower takes on an even more layered role, playing the role of Helly/Helena, who has a very complicated double life, with perfect sensitivity. Turturro has never played a better role or given a more powerful performance, suggesting an underlying passion in the seemingly indifferent Irv. He remains in love with Bart, a former Lemon employee played by Christopher Walken. Bart reads Walken’s lines with joy and purity. No one’s dinner invitation that starts with “I have ham” sounds the same. Trammell Tillman returns as Lumon’s boss, Mr. Milczyk, and his smile is more menacing than ever. Ben Stiller directs with visual flair, contrasting the dark, snowy outside world with Lemont’s claustrophobic, blinding maze of white hallways.
Most of the differences are still unclear. Among other things, we learn more about Dylan’s family and discover that it is possible to find a secret place to have sex inside LeMond’s office. Guest actors come and go, including Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever, Bob Balaban, and Alia Shawkat.
Apple TV+ only sent out 6 out of 10 episodes to critics, so I couldn’t say much about the final part of the season even if I wanted to. But by the halfway point, the story takes a turn involving a chip in an employee’s brain, and while the stakes rise, the storyline isn’t as compelling as it should be, at least not yet. Too much science fiction can disrupt the show’s perfect balance.
And the cult-like aspect of Lumon, where everyone treats 19th-century founder Keir Egan like a prophet and whose company brochure is seen as a religious, Biblical document, has never been so strong. It hasn’t received much attention for a long time. The fact that employees always refer to Mr. Milczyk as “Mr. Milczyk” in a condescending manner, like an elementary school student addressing a teacher, is just the beginning. No matter what happens in the final episode, there’s plenty to savor, including the perfect disdain in Innie Mark’s voice when she says, “Praise Keir.”
The first two episodes of Severance Season 2 will be released on Apple TV+ on January 17th, with new episodes released weekly.
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
