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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SEVERANCE IS AN INDICTMENT OF WORKPLACE HELL  
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Eileen Jones
March 18, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Apple’s dystopian workplace thriller Severance entered its second
season as a genuine cultural phenomenon. With its brutal satire of the
American corporate structure, it’s easy to see why. _

Tramell Tillman and Britt Lower in season 2 of Severance. , (Apple
TV+)

 

_Severance_ is probably the best show on television. And I only say
“probably” because I can’t possibly watch everything on
television for the sake of comparison.

Is there already an online backlash beginning to develop among
would-be hipsters? Of course. It must follow as the night the day, as
Shakespeare put it, the backlash following anything good becoming
popular. Ignore it. The are stronger and weaker episodes, as with
every series, but overall the level of excellence is astonishing.

Now nearly through its second season on Apple TV+, with the final
episode available on March 21, _Severance_ continues to dazzle. The
show’s elective “severance” procedure involves an operation on
the brain that cleaves the “work” consciousness from that of the
individual’s personal life, so that neither part knows anything
further about the other. In theory, this allows people to enjoy their
lives unaware of the drudgery of their working hours, while their work
selves are mentally clear to focus on their jobs. In reality, the
workers are prison labor in unusually sleek surroundings,
psychologically tortured to keep them in line.

Created by Dan Erickson, whose own suffering in corporate jobs
inspired the series, and produced and mostly directed by Ben Stiller,
this sci-fi combo of paranoid thriller and dark office comedy is so
well executed that the bleakness of its subject matter is offset by
the vigor of its style and construction. Film noir from the
mid-century achieved the same effect, consistently presenting a view
of modern American hell with such verve, it became a perverse pleasure
to stare into such a chillingly pertinent representation of the abyss.

The series’ popularity suddenly exploded after the launch of Season
2, with record-breaking numbers signing up to watch it — so that
it’s now the most-viewed show
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the history of Apple TV+, beating even the beloved comedy _Ted
Lasso_.

The bleakness of _Severance_’s subject matter is offset by the
vigor of its style and construction.

It seems people are even beginning to use _Severance_-based slang
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referring readily to their “Innie” and “Outie” selves.

It’s become enough of a cultural phenomenon that Ross Douthat, a
columnist at the _New York Times_, felt the need to come to grips
with the show’s popularity and wrote a piece
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“What Is ‘Severance’ About?” He genuinely puzzles over it for
paragraphs, pondering for example, whether the series will turn out to
be essentially anticlimactic and meaningless after a long buildup of
red herrings, based on a parallel he perceives between the show’s
unexplained goat-breeding room in the sinister biotech firm Lumon
Industries and the periodic appearances of the polar bear in _Lost._

But then, it figures that Douthat, being a conservative, wouldn’t
recognize that an insightful series about a corporate workplace
dystopia could be so compelling to so many people. Being preoccupied
by hellish labor conditions is generally a left-wing thing. But even
after decades of movie and television representations of evil
corporations, villainous bosses, and nightmarish workplace scenarios
of all kinds, it’s clear that an astute new variation will still be
riveting to the general population.

There are those who say the series is a post-COVID-19 pandemic
phenomenon, because the lockdown estranged workers from their
workplaces. And no doubt that experience has added a frisson of extra
horror to the endless depictions of the corporate world as
fundamentally cold, creepy, exploitative, and dehumanizing.

On top of all that, the US citizenry now has billionaire corporate CEO
and all-around asshat Elon Musk acting as an unelected copresident
with Donald Trump, sending his Department of Government Efficiency
minions rampaging through federal agencies undermining the functioning
of key social services as well as tanking the economy for obscure
reasons of their own. So we have no problem recognizing the strangely
outsize power of corporate bosses whose sickening abuses routinely
destroy working-class people in _Severance_.

Season 2 of the series explores more the psychological twistedness of
the bosses at Lumon Industries as well as the mysterious and maniacal
philosophy behind their most egregious crimes against their workers.
This is inevitable given where Season 1 left off, which was a
breakthrough point when the four-employee team making up the Macrodata
Refinement (MDR) department — conciliatory leader Mark S. (Adam
Scott), straitlaced Lumon-worshipping Irving B. (John Turturro),
sardonic Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) who nevertheless tends to suck up to
the bosses, and recalcitrant newcomer Helly R. (Britt Lower) —
engage in a long-overdue worker revolt. They figure out how to
temporarily overcome the severing of their consciousnesses in order
for worker “Innies” to experience the lives of their “Outies”
in the world beyond the Lumon building.

The biggest reveal about the Outie life of Helly R., the most fervent
anti-Lumon rebel at work, is that she’s actually Helena Eagan. That
is, she’s the daughter of Lumon CEO Jame Eagan and direct descendent
of the revered nineteenth-century founder of the company, Kier Eagan,
and the current, ruthlessly committed heiress apparent of the company.
She only underwent the severance procedure in order to spearhead a
publicity campaign for Lumon Industries.

But first, a recap is probably necessary. Also a spoiler alert, if you
haven’t seen Season 1. (What are you waiting for?)

The dominant narrative of _Severance_ Season 1 involves the volatile
efforts of management and coworkers to integrate new employee Helly R.
into the oppressive corporate life of Lumon Industries. Helly R., a
fearless and healthy-minded redhead, just isn’t having it. From the
moment she wakes up as a total amnesiac on the long table in the
conference room, which is where each new employee arrives after going
through the severance process, Helly R. is engaged in a fierce
combination of fight and flight, trying to get out of there.

We have no problem recognizing the strangely outsize power of
corporate bosses whose sickening abuses routinely destroy
working-class people in _Severance_.

She pounds on every exit door, flees down hallways, hurls office
implements at the coworkers she regards as her jailers. When none of
that works, she tries superficial cooperation, submitting a formal
resignation through office channels. Resignation request denied. She
attempts stealth, trying to smuggle forbidden notes to her Outie
urging her never to come back inside this place.

Finally, her Outie is shown to her in a recording, telling her that
the choice has already been made, and that she has to stop thinking of
herself as someone with autonomy. “You are not a person,” Helena
tells Helly coldly. From that point on, Helly is seeking the means to
destroy alter-ego Helena by any means necessary, up to and including
threatening to slice her own fingers off with an office paper cutter
if she’s not released from Lumon’s “severed floor” — because
after all, they’re also Helena’s fingers.

The acme of her efforts is an attempt to hang herself, a suicide
attempt that doubles as a way to murder Helena. Helly stages it inside
the elevator where severed employees undergo the transition that
erases from recent memory all the time they spent outside Lumon
Industries. As far as the Innies know, the elevator doors close on
them at 5:15 p.m. and open again almost immediately at 9:00 a.m.
They’re never not at work.

The main series protagonist is Mark S., or Mark Scout in the Outie
world. He’s so grief-stricken by the loss of his wife Gemma (Dichen
Lachman) in a fatal car accident that he regards severed life as a
boon — at least part of him gets to escape his agony, while the rest
of him goes on suffering. We see his Outie sobbing in his car in the
Lumon parking lot, before transforming in the elevator into an
all-too-cooperative Innie who smiles blankly and normalizes the
bizarre management style of his immediate supervisor, omnipresent
manager Mr Milchick (Tramell Tillman) of the MDR department, and his
icy boss, floor manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette). They in
turn answer to “the Board,” a faceless entity that communicates
— barely — via office telecom.

Mark S. is briefly disturbed by the loss of his work friend Petey (Yul
Vazquez), when he’s suddenly informed, without explanation, that
Petey “is no longer with Lumon Industries,” a chilling phrase that
sounds like a death sentence — and it actually does mean the death
of an Innie. But at the same time, Mark is promoted to Petey’s old
job as head of the four-person MDR group. Mollified, he very quickly
sets about doing first the task assigned, trying to integrate Helly R.
into his small team. The team also includes the stiffly correct Irving
B., who worships all things Lumon, especially founder Kier Eagan. But
Irving is older than the others and inclined to fall asleep on the
job, an involuntary transgression that’s punished by a dreaded trip
to “the Break Room,” where a form of psychological torture is
practiced to extract confessions and abject apologies from erring
employees.

And the fourth is Dylan G., who’s sardonic about corporate life with
fellow employees and a total suck-up to his bosses, always working
assiduously at the department’s mysterious data-cleansing job so he
can rack up more Lumon rewards such as finger traps in the MDR
department’s signature blue. He’s working his way up to the waffle
breakfast that’s considered a high-value perk for only the most
deserving employees.

The disappearance of Petey and the struggles with Helly set off
ripples that lead to the whole team getting embroiled in edgy
behaviors that’ll bring the hammer down on them in Season 2. For
example, straitlaced Irving gets drawn into a forbidden office romance
with Burt G. (Christopher Walken) of the Optics and Design (O&D)
department, which turned out to be a fan-favorite plot development in
the series.

The main, recurring, and guest casts are astonishingly good and
accomplished.

All of which brings us to Season 2, which picks up five months later
as Mark S. awakens after the worker revolt is quashed and finds
disturbing changes at Lumon. Floor manager Harmony Cobel is “no
longer with Lumon Industries,” making Mr Milchick the new floor
manager. He’s adopted a new “softer” approach in management
style, which involves praising the “Lumon rebels” for pushing for
much-needed corporate reforms. There’s even a crudely animated film
about their heroism and all the changes at Lumon Industries, which
involve openness and transparency and responding to worker requests.

Which is all very well except for one thing — nobody will tell him
where his team is. Irving B., Dylan G., and Helly R. are all missing,
and there’s a new MDR team sitting at their four-module combination
desks in the middle of the huge windowless office space. It’s one of
the great comical yet grimly realistic moments in the show, when Mark
S. walks into his office and finds three new and completely
unrecognizable coworkers sitting where his friends used to be.
There’s even one with his name, Mark W. (Bob Balaban), who asks if
Mark S. would be willing to go by a different name “to avoid
confusion.”

Having actors like Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat show up in what are
essentially cameo roles indicates the “cool
factor” _Severance_ has achieved. The main, recurring, and guest
casts are astonishingly good and accomplished.

This uncanny scene featuring new workers at old worker desks
demonstrates the absolute fungibility of corporate workers, who can
always be replaced with new cogs in the wheel without interrupting the
relentless business of the corporate entity — though in the case of
Lumon Industries, it’s not clear what that business might be. The
MDR department sits at desktop computers looking at screens full of
numbers until they recognize numbers that appear “scary.” They
cull and bin those numbers. That’s it. That’s their entire job.

Which is not much of a sci-fi reach, that job description. My godson
worked at Tesla, Inc. for a while, Elon Musk’s car company that’s
now tanking worldwide, and I’m proud to say he led a groundbreaking
effort to unionize the Tesla Buffalo branch, before he and all the
other unionizers were laid off. But until that happened, his job was
to endlessly click on and identify what was contained in various
on-screen images, sort of like those “I am not a robot” tests
online that ask you to choose all the images that have streetlights in
them or something. It was, ironically, a way to train the company’s
AI system in object recognition.

Mark S., however, refuses to accept the loss of his former team. And
for mysterious reasons, Mark’s wishes are being catered to as long
as he’s working on “refining” the data categorized under the
name “Cold Harbor.” Lumon management conspires to keep him happy
until that landmark date of completion, which is looming, for reasons
we don’t yet know, even to the point of arranging to give him
something else he desires — which is Helly R.

It’s just one of many ways _Severance _recognizes the grotesque,
religion-addled, ideologically driven hell on Earth we’ve created in
the American workplace.

This is arranged during one of the greatest episodes in Season 2,
called “Woe’s Hollow.” That’s the remote, snowbound site where
Mark’s reunited team abruptly find themselves stranded, supposedly
because Mr Milchick is responding to their request to be able to go
outdoors occasionally, a typical punitive act of corporate
passive-aggression. It’s both ludicrous and scary, which is the
combo the show specializes in, and a perceptive one if you want to
evoke our current reality. MDR team members dressed in tall
Russian-style fur hats topping off their elaborate winter outfits come
to consciousness and start shouting desperately at each other across
vast stretches of icy tundra, trying to figure out where they are and
what they should do to survive without apparent food, shelter, or
sources of heat.

Always sharply dressed Mr Milchick finally arrives, wonderfully kitted
out in all-white, fur-trimmed outerwear, to help them find their
heated pods and food supplies and clue them in to their educational
mission, retracing the steps of Lumonn founder Kier Eagan on a crucial
trip he once took with his twin brother. Mr Milchick also gives them
sinister warnings such as the typically faux-religious Lumon adage,
“Stray not from Kier’s path / lest you roil nature’s wrath.”

That terrible poetry is a good example of the various Kier
Eagan–related sayings distilled from his nineteenth-century
philosophy that is woven into the workings of Lumon Industries. It’s
one of the best parts of the series, the way the history of the
corporation is depicted. Of course, now people get a bit sentimental
about that old philanthropic approach of corrupt tycoons, for
understandable reasons. At least people got libraries and schools and
art galleries and some very nice public buildings.

It’s just one of many ways _Severance _recognizes the grotesque,
religion-addled, ideologically driven hell on Earth we’ve created in
the American workplace — finding the common thread running from the
oligarchs of the robber-baron era to today. Let’s revel in this rare
excoriating satire while we can!

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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