Created by Dan Erickson
Directed by Ben Stiller & Aoife McArdle
Starring
Adam Scott
Zach Cherry
Britt Lower
Tramell Tillman
Jen Tullock
Dichen Lachman
Michael Chernus
John Turturro
Christopher Walken
Patricia Arquette
Composer Theodore Shapiro
Production
Executive producers Ben Stiller, Nicholas Weinstock, Jackie Cohn, Mark Friedman, Dan Erickson, Andrew Colville, Chris Black, John Cameron
Producers Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Aoife McArdle, Amanda Overton, Gerry Robert Byrne
Cinematography Jessica Lee Gagné, Matt Mitchell
Editors Geoffrey Richman, Gershon Hinkson, Erica Freed Marker
Production companies Red Hour Productions, Fifth Season[a]
Original release Apple TV+, 2022
Ever since a deliberate misinterpretation of an 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road, corporations have been considered “persons” in the eyes of the law. They have most of the same rights, and few if any of the responsibilities. It is probably THE most poisonous encroachment on American rights and liberties in the nation’s history.
And ever since, people have discussed if corporations are people, then do the rules they are legally obliged to live by make them pathological in human terms. They are required to maximize profit while minimizing or externalizing all costs. A good overall look at this phenomenon can be found here.
( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201103/why-corporations-are-psychotic )
Suppose a corporation was formed where most human engagement with its surrounding human culture was severed, and it was deliberately set up in the form of a religious cult? Would such an entity be not just sociopathic, but psychotically psychopathic?
Severance provides a chilling answer to that. Lumon Corporation has discovered a way to “sever” its employees into “innies” – their office workers – and “outies” – the same people who live their lives outside the work place. Each severed portion is totally unaware of the routines and events occurring in the life of the other half. They know they each have a totally separate and unknown life, but know nothing at all about what it is.
Lumon Corporation is deeply and weirdly creepy, and there is a pervasive sense of wrongness about the place. The hallways seem an endless and featureless maze, few signs or markers of any kind. People navigate led by corporate officers (many of whom are unsevered.) Nobody knows what the company does. In the department where our regular characters exist (“live” is an exaggeration) they select numbers from computer screens based on how the numbers — seemingly identical — make them ‘feel’. Other departments raise goats, or fabricate watering cans from 3D printing, or create tractor art.
The art, yes. Scattered about the place are painting of the company’s founder, gazing heroically to a sunrise denoting a glorious future, or adulated by oil-based mobs of cheering supplicants. There is even an atrium where the founder’s childhood home has been restored, nail by nail, board by board, and it is considered the greatest honor for an employee to be allowed to visit there.
Quotas are central to the existence of the workers. Failing to meet quotas can result in fairly extreme sanctions, while meeting quarterly goals can result in such glorious prizes as Chinese finger traps, a tray of glazed donuts, or a singalong to some soft jazz played on an old Victrola that the founder once played. The paucity of emotion and personality of the place is terrifying.
A new hire joins the team after the previous team leader is sent away. She is horrified by the culture of the innies, and is driven to attempting suicide. Her outie — her alternate self — even while injured by the suicide attempt — refuses to allow the innie to leave. Meanwhile the previous team leader suffers an impossible event: the wall between the two selves breaks down, and he becomes aware of both worlds. He contacts one of his former cubicle-mates to warn him, but of what?
Severance is chilling, brilliant fiction. I spent much of it convinced that I had wandered into a great adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel of which I had been unaware. (It actually sprang from the mind of Dan Erickson). It’s creepy, it’s intelligent, it’s emotionally demanding, and at the end of the ninth episode you’ll find yourself clamoring for the second season and simultaneously dreading it.
Yes, corporations are pathological. Lumon shows what can happen when the few constraints society has on these entities are taken away. This is great science fiction.