From director and executive producer Ben Stiller and creator Dan Erickson comes “Severance.” Mark Scout (Adam Scott) leads a team at Lumon Industries, whose employees have undergone a severance procedure, which surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives. This daring experiment in “work-life balance” is called into question as Mark finds himself at the center of an unraveling mystery that will force him to confront the true nature of his work… and of himself.
The series is written and created by Dan Erickson. Mark Friedman, Chris Black, John Cameron and Andrew Colville are executive producers alongside Erickson. Ben Stiller, Nicky Weinstock and Jackie Cohn executive produce through Red Hour Productions, and both Patricia Arquette and Adam Scott serve as producers. Endeavor Content serves as the studio.
Noah Gittell for The Guardian:
Ben Stiller… has returned to his generation’s ground zero with Severance, a hit series on Apple TV+ produced by Stiller (he also directed six of its nine episodes) that presents a uniquely dystopian view of office life. Its success with a new generation shows how the values of Gen X continue to reverberate through the years.
The series, which releases new episodes on Fridays, revolves around Lumon, a mysterious company requiring employees working on classified projects to undergo a “severance” procedure that splits their consciousness in half. After having a chip injected into their brains, they achieve a radical work-life balance. When they’re on the clock in their windowless, basement office, they can’t remember their home life, and the minute they leave the office, they forget everything from work. It seems at first a strange but innocuous arrangement, until the series unveils its most horrifying implication: the “innies,” as the work-bound selves are known, never get to leave. They’re prisoners at work, which means they never get to enjoy the fruits of their labor…
At its core, it’s another mystery box show, like Lost or True Detective (or any episode of Black Mirror), that teases the viewer with a big reveal… What keeps people watching Severance is its hilarious and terrifyingly astute insights into the absurdism of corporate culture… Although the final two episodes of Severance’s initial run have not yet aired, it has garnered enough buzz that a second season is surely in the offing.
MacDailyNews Take: As we just wrote this morning:
“Severance,” if you haven’t yet seen it, is beautifully shot and extremely well-acted. It’s a compelling, thought-provoking series – highly recommended.
See also: Lumon Industries’ LinkedIn pages, including videos
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.
Were you high when you commended this?
You need a certain entry-level IQ (above 3 digits) to appreciate this show.
Stopped watching, it became odd.
It’s kind of eerie but I can’t stop watching it. The idea of always being at work is terrifying. If you are the worker you have no memory of being away from work. You only remember work. What a nightmare. Patricia Arquette is awesomely icky.