How’s your work-life imbalance? This ‘loopy’ office show is uncannily gratifying

Have you ever wanted to screw your head off and hose it out? Or employ some efficient way to clear out cobwebs, dark spots, bits of mould, unnecessary baggage, then screw it back on, feeling refreshed and lighter? Have you wanted to fast-forward past trauma instead of actually live it? Ignore pain, sideline grief? Scuttle past life events that might weigh you down?

Severance, then, is a show that will gratify you. Now at the end of its second season, the series The New York Times has called a “loopy sci-fi marvel, the most ambitious, batty and all-out pleasurable show on TV” has managed to encapsulate the anxiety, tension and compartmentalisation of the modern working person in an uncanny and brilliant way.

“It’s just work.” Or so Mark (front right) dared to suggest to his boss in Severance. Credit: Apple TV+

As I write, I am impatiently waiting for the finale to land – in just a few hours. So I won’t indulge in spoilers. But in short, for those who have missed it, Severance creates a world where some people are able to sever into two selves by virtue of an implant into their brains – their “innie” that goes to work and has no knowledge or awareness of the outside world, and the original “outie” that inhabits the personal realm – homes, families – without having a single clue about what their “innie” does all day. You watch the characters descend into their subterranean offices at 9am in an elevator in which their twitching faces reveal their switching consciousnesses. They ascend in the same way at 5pm.

In control of this experimental process is a creepy biotechnology corporation called Lumon Industries, which has a quasi-religious backstory with a founder named Kier, and its own odd rituals, coded language and cliched corporate largesse such as fruit carts, as well as rewards such as waffles and “musical dance experiences”. (The cavernous mid-century office complex where Severance is beautifully shot, Bell Works in New Jersey, has become a tourist attraction.)

Like the much-loved Lost, Severance is a mystery or puzzle-box show, a narrative centred on unravelling a central mystery, slowly revealed after a series of curious events. Which is possibly why the No. 1 Google search about this show is “What the heck is Severance about?” Yet it has set viewing records, surpassing Ted Lasso to become Apple’s most-watched series, and bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars.

Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit:

Beyond the TV show, Severance has spawned countless opinion and analysis articles, as Deadline puts it, “driving conversation with an outsized pop culture footprint”.

The timing of this visually taut, Ben Stiller-directed series feels uncanny, as, after being roiled by COVID, workers in Australia and the US slowly, often reluctantly, return to work after years of working from home in some capacity. This has taken longer than most employers expected. Almost three-quarters of Australian workers spend some time working at home in a hybrid pattern. When we’re in the office, we can’t blur our backgrounds any more.

The question becomes: who are we at work? Why does work seem so uncomfortable and sterile now? How does a work spouse compare with a regular spouse? When do work friends become real friends? Do we accept a friend request from a co-worker on Facebook? Do we really want them to see our real selves, sloppy and messy, or quiet and intense, with quirks, strange hobbies and stranger friends? We rarely show our full selves on social media – why at work then?

The innies in the show walk and talk differently to their outies; they feel like different people. The innies, unburdened, more cheerful and somehow naive, the outies, world-weary, exhausted and unmotivated. Hellie, the rebellious, authentic-seeming innie of one severed female, rages against her sleek, controlling, sinister outie Helena.

It’s a neat satire of a world where HR consultants advise people to, horrifyingly, “bring their full selves to work”, a term that has slipped from meaning “be real” to collapsing the necessary boundaries between a public and private life. It warns of giving everything to work, of devotion to distant, profit-making overlords who don’t care about employees. When Mark tells his boss, Mr Milchick, that he wants the day off because “it’s just work”, it seems a shocking, raw moment.

The show is also a satire of a planet where, increasingly, people feel the daily burden of comprehending a warming, rapidly changing world where carnage and genocides are somehow tolerated, public figures are openly doing Nazi salutes and antisemitism is resurging. It has become, so often, too much. We grow anxious and try to switch off. We burrow into our homes, going out less, we bury ourselves in our couches and beds, we switch off the news – but what if we could turn it all off completely, for half a day, or half a life?

As the world narrows and crackles, is it ourselves we will flee from? Our capacity to feel? Is it coincidence that the drug ketamine, now booming in usage in the US and Australia, is known for its ability to distance our minds from our lives? According to The Atlantic, in a piece analysing Elon Musk’s use of the drug, “ketamine’s great strength has always been its ability to sever humans from the world around them”: “[it] is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time”. This makes it useful for treating depression, but dangerous when used recreationally, even fatally as Matthew Perry found. In 2019, Donald Trump ordered “a lot” of a ketamine derivative for depressed veterans.

If the world is a bin fire, what do we do with our heads? How do we protect our mental health?

If we are anxious, depressed, prone to self-loathing, how can we disconnect from ourselves, inure ourselves from the pain? Denver International Airport played on the Severance theme by posting a picture of a plane climbing the air with the words: “This is a sign for your innie to book your outie a vacay. You both deserve it.”

It’s a clever pitch, aimed at those craving escape but feeling stuck, wondering if they are just a drug, a job or a plane ride away from another life, another self.

Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: how grace changes everything.

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