Severance Cuts Loose

Ben Stiller's uncanny workplace dramedy is back in business.

This article contains minor spoilers for Severance through to season two, episode four.

“This isn’t, like, hell or something?” asks Helly R (Britt Lower), the unwilling new hire at Lumen Industries, having woken to find herself trapped in a surreal basement office space with no memory of her former life. The team behind the Apple+ TV show Severance were wise to get that question out of the way, just as M. Night Shyamalan was wise to impose one condition before agreeing to direct the pilot of the short-lived science-fiction mystery series Wayward Pines: “As long as everybody isn’t dead, I’m in.”

Still more wisely, Severance unlike Wayward Pines laid some vital cards on the table from day one: the core situation is spelled out in the 2022 pilot, written by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller, who have remained as the show’s joint overseers into the long-delayed season two. Helly isn’t dead, nor is she even figuratively in hell, as Mark S (Adam Scott), the supervisor showing her the ropes, is quick to reassure her. Purgatory might be closer, bearing in mind that in one sense Helly chose her fate—as did her new colleagues in Lumen’s Macrodata Refinement department, including the snarky but not ill-natured Mark, soon revealed as the actual protagonist.