‘Severance’ season 2 review: Is this the smartest show around?
Summary
The second season of ‘Severance’, in solving (some of) the questions posed by the first, feels like a more familiar thriller
A girl once told me that Colin Firth was clearly Mr Darcy in the streets, but given his Mamma Mia! dance moves, must be disco in the sheets. The charming “in the streets / in the sheets" phrase exposes our duality. The first part is about our public-facing persona, the second who we are behind closed doors. “Obama in the streets, Osama in the sheets." “Times New Roman in the streets, Wingdings in the sheets." We all have sides. The regal can be ridiculous, the demure depraved. It’s thrilling that we each contain multitudes, but the trick is knowing when to switch.
Severance is about that switch being a literal one. Created by Dan Erickson, the Apple TV+ series stunned us in 2022 with a fully formed vision of a future where people were voluntarily undergoing brain-transplants in order to achieve work-life balance. That first season was perfect science-fiction, cool and confounding and unlike anything else out there. That idea of compartmentalisation, merely in order to function, taken to such a drastic extreme seemed both ludicrous (in the streets) while alarmingly plausible (in the sheets).
The show is set around the cryptic, cult-like Lumon organisation, where a group of “innies" work on a severed floor: their “outies" come to office, clock in, and wake up when they leave the office. In the interim, the innies—who literally know only the workplace—work on something without being told why. (In the first season, one of them speculated that they might be removing swear words from movies.) They are told only that the work is mysterious and important, and in these cases we mostly take the word of those signing the cheques.
Why would a human being sever themselves? In the case of Mark Scout (Adam Scott), he was unable to function after the death of his wife, feeling like he was “choking on her ghost." This corporate biohacking gave his outie a few hours of rest and his innie a few of productivity. Burt (Christopher Walken) lived a life of sin and wanted a chance for his innie to go to heaven. Dylan (Zack Cherry) drifted in life, not finding anything he was good at, yet on the severed floor, he was a badass. Why do we do what we do? Why do we still do what we do? These questions don’t always lead to reassuring answers. Like God (and Lumon), we work in mysterious ways.
Severance has a remarkable aesthetic. Directed mostly and strikingly by Ben Stiller, the series looks like something Stanley Kubrick and Jony Ive would both sign off on. Lumon Industries is a cathedral of negative space, with endless corridors of sterile and fluorescent white, punctuated by the occasional pop of a green typewriter or a cobalt blue dress. The show weaponises emptiness, turning vacant parts of the frame into a canvas for our projections. This dramatically pared-back aesthetic feels both alien and intimate. It’s beautiful, yes, but impractical to a fault—less a workplace, more a monument to control. Less is more.
Season 1 ended with a jaw-dropping cliffhanger, one where the innies briefly overpowered their outies and tried to reach the world outside their office—with dramatic consequences. That season perpetually moved forward as relentlessly as an office clock, the mystery unfolding without a single flashback in sight. That staggeringly original season forced us to keep up. This second season, in solving (some of) the questions posed by the first, is less challenging and somewhat more predictable, and feels like a more familiar thriller, leaning on tropes and flashbacks and conflicts we can see coming—as opposed to the first season where every narrative beat felt “important and mysterious."
Season 1 was slow but elegant. Season 2 often treads water. One indulgent episode—almost wholly in flashback—shows Mark’s real-world relationship with his wife: a beautifully shot episode about their romance (shown in a musical montage) and fertility woes that feels like a sentimental slog, when the propulsive plot has us primed for sharper cuts. Another deals with Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and her backstory, which feels like an exasperating pause that halts the momentum cold. These are important character beats, certainly, but the show’s pacing this season has been uncertain enough to make them drag.
The performances are superb. Scott’s Mark is a man unravelling in slow motion, Britt Lower’s Helly a spark of fury, Zach Cherry’s Dylan a wry anchor. Tramell Tillman’s Mr Milchick is magnetic and mercurial, an office manager berated for using too many big words. Patricia Arquette’s Ms. Cobel is a cracked porcelain enigma, and John Noble’s Fields adds a velvet menace. All while Walken and John Turturro find a strange, tender, softshoe love to guide them through this sterile maze. This talented cast, with silences as potent as their words, turns an occasionally indulgent script into something electric.
Then, a thunderclap finale. An action explosion that shakes the season awake. Guards? Surveillance? Don’t bother asking why they’re scarce—there’s no need when the workers aren’t seen as human, just cogs in Lumon’s machine. Human error isn’t a factor when humanity itself is stripped away. The logic is brutal. The season builds to this, a crescendo that justifies the slow burn, even if it can’t fully mask the predictability of its drumbeats.
In one tremendous scene, Adam Scott talks to himself: as both Mark’s innie and Mark’s outie. Both feel wronged, both feel righteous anger, both feel the need to be heard by the other. Both fight for love. One of the show’s missteps, for me, is how all the innies simultaneously long for love. It all happens at once. This timing feels suspect, but then… Bad timing in the streets, romance in the sheets.
Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.
