Eventually, though, what we see of Mark and others at home helps inform what’s happening to their work selves, in ways that are at times shocking, at others darkly funny. Outie Mark is such a glum sad sack that nonwork scenes tend to drag even after he gets involved with people who claim to have found a way to undo the severance process. The real-world passages are bumpier near the start of the season. (*) Severance is now the third collaboration between Arquette and Stiller, after he directed her in Dannemora and played her husband way back when in 1996’s Flirting With Disaster. Stiller’s facility with tone, and the sheer oddity of innie life, makes the early chapters compelling even though very little happens at first. His camera makes the impressively weird production design seem even more unnerving, and he gets fascinating, nuanced performances from familiar actors like Scott (leaning hard into his everyman charm, with strong results) and Turturro, as well as less heralded ones like Lower and Tillman. Here he captures both the strangeness of the concept and its emotional implications. Stiller has become an even more assured and visually inventive filmmaker than he was on 2018’s Escape From Dannemora (*). Milchick (Tramell Tillman), has not undergone severance and always knows who and what she is - refers to the company’s founder as if he were the messiah.
Irving studies the company manual like it’s the Bible, while Harmony - who, along with perma-smiling henchman Mr. But within a few episodes, it becomes clear that Helly is onto something on a metaphorical level, and not just because older coworkers like Irving, the quirky Burt (Christopher Walken), and domineering boss Harmony (Patricia Arquette) treat the company itself as their religion.
Later, she wonders if she has died and this bright, antiseptic, decidedly retro office space is really hell. In one scene, she asks if she’s just livestock, grown to be someone else’s food. She wakes up lying on top of a conference room table with no memory of who she is or how she got there, and spends much of the first episode convinced - not unfairly - that she is part of something nefarious.
Though Mark is the main character in both worlds, Erickson and Stiller smartly use Helly as our point-of-view figure for the work scenes.
(*) There are also hints of the first season of Amaz on’s own genre mash-up Homecoming, plus Joss Whedon’s short-lived Fox drama Dollhouse - complete with the latter show’s Dichen Lachman playing a vivid supporting role here as a company wellness counselor. But anyone who has devoted too many hours to a job while enduring platitudes about how the company is like a family may soon find themselves relating to the trapped innies. Severance gradually reveals why the outie versions of Mark and his office-mates - pretentious Irving (John Turturro), competitive Dylan (Zach Cherry), and frustrated newcomer Helly (Britt Lower) - would subject a part of their identities to such a horrific fate. He is always working, all day and every day of the strange half-life his outie chose for him.Ĭreated by Dan Erickson and primarily directed by Ben Stiller, the show literalizes the struggle for work-life balance in a way that feels equal parts Charlie Kaufman-esque sci-fi whimsy, paranoid Seventies thriller, and end-stage capitalism satire(*).
As far as innie Mark is concerned, he never gets to go anywhere, see anyone but his colleagues, know anything about his personal life, sleep, or get any kind of break.
So there are essentially two Marks: the “innie,” who only exists in and around the sub-basement cubicle where he does some inscrutable kind of data entry, and the “outie,” who has no clue what his body does down there for eight hours a day. The show takes place in a world where corporate employees can volunteer for a “severance” procedure that completely separates their memories of their time at the office from their memories of everything else. In the engrossing new Apple TV+ thriller Severance, Adam Scott plays Mark, a man who literally has no life outside of work - well, half the time, anyway.