Severance vs. Severance
I watched the finale but I don't spoil it here!
Admin: I’m going to do a mailbag about Fact People, because that brought up a lot of stuff for people and the responses were genuinely super interesting and varied. But first—some quickie thoughts about Severance! No finale spoilers, but I do say Adam Scott’s age which is a crazy open secret.
When I first heard there was a new TV show called Severance, I assumed it was based on Ling Ma’s novel Severance, which I loved. It’s not, but the two weirdly have a lot in common!
They’re both realistic with one weird medical twist — in Severance (novel), the twist is a fictional global pandemic. The disease (Shen Fever) gets people stuck in unbreakable behavioral loops (and then kills them). In Severance (TV), the twist is this fictional brain surgery that severs workers’ consciousness, so there’s a version of themselves they’ve never met—their “innie”—who’s only conscious at the office. Speaking of which…
They both are set heavily at an office — In Severance (novel), the narrator is one of the last “Shen Fever” survivors in New York, and one of the last people to stop working. I think she lives in her office for a while because the elevator goes down? In Severance (TV show), the innies literally only exist in the office, specifically on the Severed Floor of Lumon. So we’re there a lot. John Turturro hates the lights.
They have the same title — Duh. In Severance (novel), the title alludes to the end of a job — and the protagonist does eventually leave her job (though no literal severance package, according to Google Generative AI :-/ I read it a long time ago, sorry). In Severance (TV), the title is the name of the special brain surgery.
But there’s one main difference between the two Severances — it’s clear to me what Severance (novel) is about: work, routine, repetition vs. novelty, health vs. habit, etc. The themes of the shared facts above are the themes of the book. It’s very conceptually cohesive, although there are other threads and digressions and stuff.
Severance (TV show), on the other hand, is not about any of the things listed above. Even though it takes place largely in an office, it doesn’t strike a chord with anything I’ve experienced in an IRL office. For instance:
In Severance (TV show), the innies don’t understand the purpose or process of what they do for work. (You feel the numbers’ vibes?!) In IRL offices, you are supposed to know what you’re doing. If you’re doing something with numbers, it’s supposed to be math.
The protagonist innies on Macrodata Refinement (MDR) are discouraged from physically finding their colleagues on their floor. They’re definitely not supposed to learn what they do or building relationships with them! In IRL offices, this is the #1 thing you’re supposed to do. Integration! Synergy! Collaboration! We’re all one team. (Also office space is too expensive and human psychology too precarious to isolate 4 people in a giant windowless room like MDR does.)
Severed jobs in Severance come with… free brain surgery?! No IRL resonance. I feel like the lean of jobs right now is more “What if everyone was a 1099 employee?”, not “We want to make a huge up-front, medical investment in junior employees.”
The hard 9-5 at Lumon, where innies get in the elevator and physically can’t think about work until they come back the next day, is not something any workplace I know about wants. No employer has ever told me like, “All your system passwords are suspended between 5pm and 9am. We’re that concerned about our privacy / your work/life balance. GO LIVE!”
The time-intensive consequences the innies get for misbehaving (this is more of a thing in Season 1—all the stuff in The Break Room) are just not the vibe at IRL jobs. Direct critical feedback is pretty rare, and no one wants to punish you. If there’s a behavioral problem, you get let go… not tortured! This is a good thing about IRL work. Thanks, work!
Senior people are surveilling junior people at nutso levels in Severance. Ms. Cobel is just sitting at her desk, watching live footage of MDR people’s physical bodies?! She’s spying on Mark’s outie at home? In IRL offices, this is not how senior people are spending their time. They are all hanging out together in endless meetings, fighting and being best friends (I think) (I really have no idea). If my boss cared THAT much what I was doing, I’d wonder if I should be their boss instead.
So. Historically, I thought this was a weakness of Severance (TV show). It seems like it’s a thoughtful show about office work, but it also seems like no one in the writer’s room has worked in an office before.
But after I watched the season two finale of Severance (no major spoilers, I think), I started to see this differently. Because the themes of the show are abstract and not bound up in the setting — I’d say main themes are identity, memory, love, dissociation / compartmentalization — it’s more open to interpretation. Which is cool!
Now that I’ve watched two season of TV about severance, a “work surgery” with no clear real-world analog, I feel like it brings up echoes of all kinds of stuff for me, like:
Alcohol! Severance is kind of like other stuff we do to numb out and dissociate — in the finale, Mark’s outie makes a comment about getting severed because he was drinking too much, and it basically gave him a healthier way to forget his wife’s day for large chunks of the day. Interesting! Drinking a LOT does get you closest to the memory-reset innies get when they leave the severed floor.
Children?! I saw this TikTok that really spoke to me where the creator (@tejuabiola) argues Severance (TV show) is actually about children, and the ways parents disrespect their children’s autonomy. I LOVE this. The innies do have this kind of childlike innocence (Helly’s literally 2 seasons old!), and the outie/innie relationship is much more of a parent-child dynamic than peer-to-peer. Plus Lumon feels more like a weird, severe boarding school — with the bottomless discipline budget and the opaque authority figures — than a workplace. Even the severance surgery tracks kind of aligns with medicating rambunctious children so they behave in school…
Polyamory? This show has helped me understand the (a?) poly ideal, where you have multiple partners who connect with different facets of your personality. Then again this show has convinced me we all contain multitudes, so maybe it’s poly to be in a monogamous relationship, too!
Overall, watching Severance (TV show) has made me more open to a surreal premise or a twist or whatever that’s pure invention. Not reality turned up to 11, nothing directly allegorical — just something fictional someone asserts is real. It starts meaning things over time! And maybe the severed workplace takes on more meanings because it started out meaning nothing to me.
Question for readers
Do you think Severance is about work? Did you like the finale? Did you know Adam Scott is *51*? Lmk! Especially about that last one…
Linxxx
Highly rec Ling Ma’s short story collection, too, Bliss Montage!
This Severance (TV show) TikTok made me laugh so hard. Skip to 0:50-ish if you want. “It might be the relationship you’ve seen on screen!”
This song has MOVEMENTS like a SYMPHONY and I love it.
Trump-era research memos, from me to you <3