“Severance:” Now, About Solving the Work/Life Balance…

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The Apple TV+ series Severance puts a new spin on the work - life balance. A mix of sci-fi and social satire, Severance is gaining plaudits for its vision of a corporate world that’s as sinister as it is sterile.

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As Film School Rejects puts it, the people in Severance can’t simply clock out of work because their work is their life. Or, rather, their work is a perfectly bisected portion of their lives.

The enigmatic series follows the lives of a pod of workers who are employed by Lumon Industries, a powerful company with a long and corporate cult-like history. Each of the series’ main characters willingly underwent a procedure called severance, which involves implanting a device in one’s brain that will wall off work memories while at home, and home memories while at work.

Ben Stiller, who directs 6 of the 9 episodes optioned the script by Dan Erickson through his production company Red Hour, telling Forbes,  “The idea of going to work where you have a chip put in your head and you forget everything about your life when you’re at work and when you leave work, you don’t remember what happened was just such an interesting and kind of tantalizing idea.”

At first, this seems like a quaint premise that could be used for an easily digestible slice of social commentary, but it soon becomes clear that the series has built out every corner of its own freaky world.

“This isn’t just a neat trick to turn people into focused worker bees; it essentially turns them into two people,” explains FSR. “Characters in the show call them ‘innies’ and ‘outies.’ The “outies” don’t remember the classified work they do all day, but the ‘innies’ have it much harder. They don’t remember if they have kids or partners. They don’t experience sleep, or know how to drive, or have any sense of whether or not their experiences at work are normal.”

The jumping off point is fascinating and sets up many interesting questions about the nature of our relationship to work and the work environment. “It was a question of, where should we go tonally with the show? Because we didn’t want it to go to a familiar place, necessarily,” Stiller told Variety.

In the same interview Patricia Arquette who plays one of the company managers says, “there was so much structure” in the fictional company, but also within the making of the show itself, in terms of “the composition of the shots, in the wardrobe,” which helped establish “the behind-the-scenes working of this corporation and all the years we’ve been in it and how it had informed how we communicate with people.”

IndieWire  observes the show’s “unsettling symmetry; balancing and unbalancing compositions in order to undercut the inherent comforts of routine and uniformity.”

This is a function of camera work and production design (by Jeremy Hindle). “The oners down an endless maze of white corridors. The way cubicle walls slide up and down to trap workers in tight frames. The contrast between the timeless stasis of antiseptic office life and the bristling cold of a messy existence above ground. It’s a striking, immersive design, if you’re on or off the clock.”

Mark (Adam Scott), Irving (John Turturro), and Dylan (Zach Cherry) sit in a small, four-sided cubicle space within a massive white room, focused on computer screens displaying a series of numbers.

The series is shot with “a sometimes alienating precision,” describes FSR, “moving quickly between the outie memories and the ‘Innie’ experiences to communicate the disorientation of severance. As Lumon’s interests grow more confounding and menacing, the building starts to feel like an inescapable funhouse full of ever-twisting hallways.”

Stiller seems to have approached the scripts as if wondering “What if Hitchcock had directed The Office?” ponders AVClub adding that Severance’s deadpan humor “is more like Being John Malkovich than Zoolander and Tropic Thunder.”

The reviewer later adds that some scenes feel like a David Lynch movie. “Yet, moments from Mark’s outside life play out like Noah Baumbach comedies with an undercurrent of The X-Files…  It’s an instalment of The Twilight Zone that continues past the shock ending.”

The character of Helly, played by Britt Lower, is described by the same critic as a modern version of Patrick McGoohan’s character from The Prisoner.  “She won’t be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. You’re led to think that Mark is Helly’s Number 2, but he’s just as much as prisoner as she is.”

Indeed, critics can’t seem to get a fix on the show’s genre. When the series zig-zags into mind-melting corporate thriller territory, for FSR it calls to mind “the better parts of less focused shows about similar subjects, like Homecoming and Mr. Robot.”

Wired suggests Stiller has distilled the sensibilities of writer-director Charlie Kaufman. “Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, (which Kaufman wrote) it’s about a man trying to deal with the grief of lost love by messing with his memory via experimental surgery. Like Being John Malkovich, it uses a high-concept mind-control premise to explore knotty questions about identity. Like Adaptation, it’s fond of genre-hopping and piling twists and turns on top of twists and turns. And, as with Kaufman’s best work, it’s at least as funny as it is trippy.”

What gives the show its sting, according to John Powers at NPR, is the way that Mark and his comrades' story tap so engrossingly into the anxieties that, even in post-COVID working conditions, many people feel about their jobs:

“How companies try to own us, how employees feel like cogs in corporate machines that they fear may be actually ruining the world, how many people bury themselves in work to avoid dealing with the difficulties of their personal lives and how many of us already live a de facto version of Severance. We have two different selves, one for work, where we play a role, and one for home, where, if we don't feel depleted, we can be who we really are.”

Stiller reflects on what these past two years have done to working conditions in Hollywood.

“One of the things I’ve really noticed recently with the pandemic was looking at the unions and talking about the work situation for crews, which is something that has just been entrenched for a long time - with the hours we work and the turnarounds on those hours for crews, basically just to save money,” Stiller told Forbes. “And so, I think that was a really important thing that changed. Everybody was looking at their priorities and looking at really what was important in life and that’s just something that has been a thing in show business for a long time that was just accepted and I think that’s changing, which I think is a really good thing.”