“All the pieces matter.”
While that quote is from a specific prestige TV series (“The Wire”), it often runs through my head when watching pretty much any show of the prestige TV era (or what remains of it). There are few feelings more satisfying than when an episode of a show contains no wasted moment, when something in a later episode harkens back to an earlier one or completes a circle that a prior episode started to draw. Or more simply, when every detail — a camera close-up, a line of dialogue, a character’s haircut — matters.
That balance can be tricky to pull off on an intricate series like “Severance.” With its sprawling scale and scope, the Apple TV+ sci-fi mystery box show risks being too cumbersome, having to build out an entire world and raise a lot of tantalizing questions — while giving viewers just enough answers so they don’t lose their patience completely. I’ll admit I wasn’t wild about its first season in 2022: I liked it, but not quite at the level of the rapturous reviews it got.
But the show’s much-anticipated second season, premiering Friday, goes to some astonishingly daring places, answering some questions while introducing new ones, and keeping viewers on the edge of their seats each week. In short, it’s well worth the nearly three years “Severance” fans have waited for the show’s return. That unusually protracted gap between seasons is partially due to the 2023 SAG and WGA strikes, which began as the show was in the middle of filming Season 2. The show’s complex nature also made for a prolonged production process. And there have been rumors of budget overages and creative differences between creator and showrunner Dan Erickson and director and executive producer Ben Stiller (which they’ve pushed back on in recent interviews).
The show’s premise involves a mysterious, cult-like company called Lumon Industries, which has invented a procedure called “severance.” It installs a chip in certain employees’ brains that establishes a complete separation between their work lives and the outside world. Effectively, that means the show’s central quartet of characters — manager Mark (Adam Scott) and his direct reports Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro) — live their lives in two halves. Mark’s “innie,” the part that sits in a cubicle all day, has no knowledge of anything outside the walls of Lumon’s brutalist office complex, while his “outie” drives home after work with no awareness or memory of what his own body just spent the day doing.
Lumon’s innie employees toil away at their sterile work stations, moving strings of numbers around on their computers as part of an inexplicable “macrodata refinement” department. The refiners, as they’re known, clock in and clock out, repeating the same day over and over again. The show and its characters’ camaraderie follow the rhythms of a great workplace sitcom — but with far more sinister implications.
Season 1 ended on a stunning and chaotic cliffhanger: As they became more aware of and alarmed by their work conditions, the innies found a loophole — the “overtime contingency” — and got a glimpse of their outies’ world. If you, like me, only vaguely remember what happened, fear not: Much of the start of Season 2 seamlessly catches viewers up, just as the characters try to piece together what they remember of their brief foray into the world outside of Lumon. Certain details might come back to you in flashes, just enough to jog your memory.
There’s a lot I’m not permitted to say about the plot details in Season 2 — but it’s for the best. The show does what I think second seasons of great shows should do: complicate and perhaps even destabilize what happened in the first season, but retain what made the first season so intriguing. In Season 2, each of the innies discovers more details about their outies. Much of the season involves keeping track of what each version of them knows or doesn’t know about each other, and watching the demarcations between the innies and outies start to break down. This can get confusing at times. However, the show carefully lays down the pieces and, one by one, assembles a pattern out of them.
In addition to perfecting the details, another satisfying hallmark of great television is when every episode finds the balance between being distinctly its own, often doing something unlike any other episode, and also pushing along the overall plot. There’s a strong sense of purpose throughout this season of “Severance.” Over the course of its 10 episodes, there are one or two that appear to depart too far from the main timeline and are maybe too out there, even for this high-concept sci-fi exercise. But just when you start to wonder why the show is doing what it’s doing — showing us a perplexing new location, say, or a character’s backstory or side plot — the episode loops back to an earlier detail and reveals its connection to the show’s central arc. It’s like taking a detour from the main trail, and then feeling relief once you’ve found your way back.
At times, the season is stylistically trippier than its first. Yet thematically, it hits even more uncomfortably close to home. “Severance” could be considered part of a golden age of television that bone-chillingly depicts the corrosiveness of capitalism, a subject also mined by “Squid Game,” “Succession” and “Industry,” among other shows. It feels appropriate that “Severance” takes place in the dead of winter, its characters battling the bitter cold. Out here in our world, as the bleak winter of 2025 plods along, “Severance” is both satisfying and eerie to watch.
When Lumon uses euphemistic corporate jargon and enacts workplace “reforms” that don’t really get at workers’ central problems, it sends shivers down my spine. In real life, tech CEOs are rushing to kiss the ring of a certain leader returning to power next week, while “economic headwinds” are forcing workers out of creative industries and squeezing an already shrinking middle class. On “Severance,” a terminated employee is described as having “departed on an elongated cruise voyage.” In real life, layoffs happen in a pretty similarly demoralizing fashion.
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“Severance” imagines a world where stuck employees are trying to get unstuck, but keep finding and contending with new labyrinths, including quite literally in the winding halls of Lumon. It makes for thrilling television, where every trapdoor leads to another one, where every piece matters. If only being a corporate drone in real life could yield similarly spectacular art.
Season 2 of “Severance” premieres Friday and airs weekly on Apple TV+.