Severance, future cult series? | The Press

You know when they say you should leave your personal problems at home and your work at the office? This division between our professional identity and our intimate life is at the heart of the formidable series Severance (VF : Dissociation), whose second season has finally arrived on AppleTV+. With one episode per week, you won’t be able to binge watch it. I was able to see six, and I’m going to bite my nails waiting for the others.

Three long years passed before having this sequel which is the one that I was waiting for the most on the American side, with the last season of The Handmaid’s Tale scheduled for spring. The pandemic and the writers’ strike in Hollywood delayed production, but the wait was worth it, because we are not here in a second season written at full speed due to the success of the first, which ended on a breathtaking climax. Everything we love about Severance is respected and thorough.

Created by Dan Erickson, a screenwriter to follow, and largely produced by actor Ben Stiller, also one of the producers, Severance surprised everyone with its originality when it was released in 2022. The finest sleuths cannot guess the progress of this complex plot, and theories are multiplying on fan forums.

In 2022, the series couldn’t have come at a better time, when office life was in the midst of teleworking. Severance flirts with science fiction while being a brilliant satire of the corporate culture that increasingly asks its employees to be completely invested in functions that sometimes have no significance, apart from the salary. Its creator, Dan Erickson, was inspired by his own despair in an office job he hated. If you want to be served when it comes to cold and endless corridors, sad parking lots, elevator music, company videos, infantilizing evaluations and activities of team buildingyou will get what you pay for with Severance.

Three years later, a recap is necessary, and I invite viewers who have not yet watched the first season to rush to see it, and take their turn for the rest of this column.

Lumon Industries is not a company like any other. Its employees voluntarily accepted a dissociation protocol, having a chip implanted in their brains, which separates their memories between work and their personal lives. As soon as they enter the company elevator, they have no memory of their life outside the office and as soon as they leave, no idea of ​​what they did at work. They are somehow divided into two distinct personalities who know nothing about each other: theinter and theexter. Thus Mark (Adam Scott), in his version interis a docile and satisfied employee, while in his version exterhe is a depressed man, broken by the death of his wife. His kind neighbor in real life is none other than Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), his harsh boss at Lumon, without him being aware of it.

Mark’s colleagues include Irving (John Turturro), a zealous employee whoseexter has the soul of an artist, and Dylan (Zach Cherry), a friendly guy unaware that he is elsewhere married and a father of children. They work in the department of macro data refinement, which is basically destroying numbers scrolling across their computer screen. Throughout the season, we never know what purpose it serves, but it seems mind-numbing, and they are closely supervised by their superior, the imperturbable Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), responsible for punishments.

The routine will be shaken up by the arrival of a new employee, Helly (Britt Lower), who fiercely resists dissociation. We can show him a video where his exter tells him that she volunteers for this experiment, Helly refuses to be an employee with no memory other than her life in Lumon. She will discover that she is the daughter of the founder of the company, to whom the company worships.

Because here we are much more in a cult than a corporate culture, and we can guess that Lumon has excessive ambitions which flout the foundations of ethics. Moreover, Lumon employees, who are called “dissociated”, are rather frowned upon by the rest of society for having accepted this controversial intervention.

During the first season of Severancewe see Mark, Helly, Irving and Dylan form a team to learn more about their exter and the true intentions of Lumon Industries. It ended with a rebellion where they managed to activate their consciousness ofinter externally, with the aim of publicly denouncing Lumon, selling the image that its employees are happy and its projects are noble. It reminds us of these resigned GAFAM employees who are trying to warn us of something. From the first episode of season 2, Mark is back at the office, where Mr. Milchick, more intimidating than ever, promises him improvements so that he stays.

This constant coming and going between the two existences of the characters is fascinating and destabilizing, brilliantly done, and this is what we find, perhaps even magnified, in the second season of Severance.

The aesthetic of this series is a tribute to liminal spaces, this hobby of Internet users who share images of strange and deserted places inspiring troubled feelings (I watch them often). Everything is done to disorient us in this series, whose settings are anachronistic. Why does it feel like an office from the 1980s when outside, people have cell phones? Why are Mark and his colleagues working on old computers? What does Lumon want to achieve?

This disorientation reinforces our empathy towards the characters, increasingly lost between their worlds, but determined to know more about themselves.

The second season of Severance don’t stretch the sauce, because we go from mysteries to revelations, recalling at times Brazil, The Truman Showand why not Twin Peaks by David Lynch, who has just left us. Severance is at once disturbing, funny and moving, carried by extraordinary actors. It will be found in the best career roles of John Turturro and Patricia Arquette, and an essential milestone in that of Adam Scott.

Because Severance questions the inalienable part of humanity in each of us in a way that artificial intelligence could never tell us, in my humble opinion, this series has everything to become cult. Ones that we want to see again, to grasp all their richness.

On AppleTV+