In its second season, the show continues to indict the corporate workplace while secretly longing for it.

March 6, 2025

Photograph courtesy Apple TV+

When “Severance” premièred, in 2022, it felt like an absurdist parable about the alienation of labor—a moody, eerie critique of technocapitalism that seemed in keeping with our age of “upskilling” and A.I. The four main characters worked at Lumon, a cultlike biotech company. Their division was “Macrodata Refinement,” so they spent each day sorting numbers into folders based on what kind of creepy feeling the numbers emitted—a Graeberian “bullshit job” by way of Stephen King. The central conceit was that each protagonist had undergone a consciousness-splitting procedure that separated their nine-to-five self, or “innie,” from their off-the-clock self, or “outie.” They did their work (whatever it was; they were told only that it was “mysterious and important”) on the “severed floor,” whose setting adhered to popular notions of the white-collar jobsite as soulless and abstract: gleaming, empty corridors and unflattering fluorescent lights, retro-futurist consoles and carpets the color of nausea. The critic Alison Herman described this aesthetic as “the uncanny office,” her allusion to the uncanny valley aptly casting Lumon’s campus as an artificial reality, and even as a figure for the internet, another dangerously insistent alternative to real life.

“Severance” implied that work made its protagonists miserable and that their misery had to do with a sort of synthetic, dead quality that seeps into any circumstance in which individuality is suppressed. The innies didn’t even get surnames; they were identified by their first names and an opening initial: Mark S., Helly R. But the message was confusing, because the characters’ home selves were miserable, too. The outies lived in Kier, a company town named for Lumon’s founder, where “dinnerless dinner parties” were a thing and it always seemed to be the dead of winter. They were lonely, static despite their freedom of movement and existentially bereft despite their reservoirs of real-world experience. The show, which streams on Apple TV+, arrived during the twilight of the pandemic’s W.F.H. phase, as the office was becoming a site not only of fear and resentment but also of longing. Many employees awaiting their R.T.O. summons were still dragging numbers into folders. They were just doing the dragging from their apartments, surrounded by dirty dishes and unfolded laundry. The imposed niceties of a necktie and the genteel disappointments of a broken coffee machine were starting to feel, if not liberating, then at least kind of fun.

At this moment when the office seemed glamorous and exotic, “Severance” felt at war with itself. Whatever the intention of its creators—and most reviews characterized the show at least partially as a workplace satire—what played out on our screens was less a critique of the office than a fetishization. Life on the severed floor was formal in both senses: outwardly polite, ceremonial, and appropriate; also, mannered, aestheticized, dominated by line and shape and color (the razor edge of a woman’s skirt, the eye-popping red of her hair).

Maybe “Severance” spoke to the post-pandemic Zeitgeist by suggesting—counterintuitively, given the show’s premise—that work doesn’t need to be confined to an office to be oppressive. Maybe the creators’ point was that work takes you over and becomes a brain state, such that only neurosurgery can save you. But it seems equally likely that the show grew so popular because the office wasn’t really being framed as a hardship at all. Rather, Lumon offered employees the opportunity to be other than they were. On the outside, Dylan (Zach Cherry) was “kind of a fuckup.” His innie was a star, with the productivity awards to prove it. Mark (Adam Scott) signed up for severance to blunt his grief after his wife, Gemma, died. He later found out that Lumon was holding Gemma prisoner. Anything of value migrates to the office.

Arriving after a gap of three years (or, if an innie is reading this, twelve quarters), the show’s second season continues to indict the corporate workplace while secretly longing for it. But if the first nine episodes—with their Jobbesian visuals and ominous focus on data—played up the “tech” aspect of Lumon’s operations, the new season brings the “bio” part of biotech to the fore. Nature intrudes on the innies’ lives in increasingly sinister ways, as when they’re spirited into the wilderness for a quasi-religious ORTBO, or Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence. Elsewhere, characters stumble on a “Mammalians Nurturable” department staffed by goth shepherdesses and a horned heavy who resembles the QAnon Shaman. Developmental imagery was always important to “Severance,” but now the creators seem especially adamant that the office doesn’t simply alienate its workers; it keeps them in a state of childlike dependence.

The four members of the Macrodata Refinement (M.D.R.) team sit at tiny workstations on undersized rolling chairs. They welcome new hires by passing around a red ball for a getting-to-know-you game. Infantilizing perks distract them from how powerless they are: when a character is lured back to Lumon after rebelling at the end of the first season, his return is celebrated with balloons, as if his parents were throwing him a birthday party. A silver-haired Patricia Arquette once presided over the severed floor, but she’s been ousted and offset by another authority figure, a pint-size former crossing guard who plays with a plastic toy. “Why are you a child?” one of her reports asks her incredulously. “Because of when I was born,” she answers.

Whereas “Severance” has the good taste to be alarmed at the prospect of kids in cubicles, other recent pieces of pop culture have seemed amused or even titillated by the idea. There’s a sense that the workplace is where children get to dress up as adults, with all of the tantalizing power—and peril—that being a grownup entails. In The Cut, Cat Zhang surveys artifacts including last summer’s “man in finance” TikTok and FKA Twigs’s “Eusexua” video; Zoomers, Zhang suggests, have begun to romanticize corporate America, perhaps craving the clarity of org charts, the stability of set hours. (Or maybe this generation covets office signifiers for the nostalgic association they conjure between labor and money.) The office, a symbolic province of the elderly, has become a particularly exciting backdrop for youthful shenanigans. On the show “Industry,” twentysomething traders bring their avidity, poor impulse control, and daddy issues to bear on their careers, with thrillingly mixed results. “Babygirl,” a film by Halina Reijn, depicts the headquarters of a robotics company as simultaneously enticing and off-limits for kids. Romy, Nicole Kidman’s C.E.O., and Samuel, a sensual intern played by Harris Dickinson, conduct a gently transgressive affair, which Samuel glosses as “like, we’re two children playing.” The end of the movie reaffirms that you shouldn’t bring your inner child to work, although it’s fine to indulge her at home, with your respectable, hot, appropriately aged husband. The implicit takeaway of the film is less tortured: immaturity at the office is good content.

“Severance,” in contrast, tries to take the subject of adult identity in the workplace seriously. A central question for the creators is what it means to be whole, a fully formed person. As the series unfolds, the innies begin to push against their carefully engineered naïveté. They discover new desires; they awaken morally and romantically. Irving B. (John Turturro) falls for his colleague Burt G. (Christopher Walken). Dylan G. connects with his outie’s wife (a luminous Merritt Wever). Mark S. and Helly R. (Britt Lower) sneak away from their computers to have sweet, exploratory sex in a storage room. (For a show “about” work, not a lot of macrodata gets refined.) The seeming endpoint of this self-becoming process, a promise hovering over both seasons, is “reintegration,” a surgical procedure that weaves one’s innie and outie consciousnesses into a single strand.

But adulthood, although great in theory, proves boring in practice. The characters on “Severance” are often most endearing when they’re being immature. Childhood is equated with whimsy, imagination, and originality. A manager, Milchick (Tramell Tillman), is scolded for his luxuriantly polysyllabic vocabulary—“Grow up,” he growls at himself in the mirror. “Can we not just be pragmatic adults?” asks one of the most odious characters of the season, a Christian zealot who pressures his partner to undergo severance so that the pair of them can be together in heaven. (This man thinks his actual beloved is too sinful to make the cut but holds out hope for an unsullied version of his lover who might unfurl belowground.)

Nowhere is adulthood more dismal than in its outie story lines, which Season 2 attempts to build out. Excepting Britt Lower’s Helena, who is coded as a child, the offspring of Jame Eagan, the outies have exhausted their arcs. The emotional force of watching them comes from what happens within Lumon, from what they don’t know because they can’t remember, from what they’ve lost—dancing to jazz or undressing a co-worker in an unused office—the innocence and sense of adventure that might as well, now, belong to someone else. Without their alternate selves to tug at them, these characters would be dull, dull, dull. Mark S.’s outie wants to recover his wife, a gem he didn’t truly appreciate until she was snatched away. Even when he’s not descending the Lumon elevator to become his innie, he’s drifting backward, remembering her voice, how they met. His quest to rescue Gemma, and to restore the past, is also a quest to restore a version of himself who is innocent of pain. Of course, that other Mark already exists, on the severed floor, and he has his own ideas. It’s hard to imagine that they include a permanent trip back up the developmental elevator.

And why would they? In Lumon’s Underworld, as in childhood and most fantasy realms, everything is cleaner and simpler. The enemy is your boss, and your revolts shine with meaning. Away from the office, the forces that knuckle you under are far more nebulous. It has become a trope in “Severance” recaps to observe that the landscapes outside of Lumon are just as white and sterile as the interiors. Frozen lakes and leafless trees evoke the myth of Persephone, in which a young girl is abducted by the god of death, and her mother, heartbroken, conceives another child, winter. Seen through this lens, “Severance” seems less about technology or capitalism than about inevitable natural processes. You can quit your job, but you still have to answer to time, fate, or whatever it is that rips the jewels from your hands and replaces them with responsibility, dailiness, grief.

Psst, reviewers and critics like to write in their “Severance” pieces. It’s not about the office. As a group, we’ve suggested that the show’s true subject might be the afterlife, the divisibility of the psyche, the Civil War, or even the decline of the Wasps. This profusion of theories itself makes the show’s point: that the workplace, and all human endeavor, is a story we create to give meaning to our lives. Fittingly, this message is relayed by characters who are absolutely unreal, no matter how many elevators they ascend or surnames they acquire. Even the show’s outies are innies, of a kind, caught deliciously in fiction. We, the viewers, are the actual outies, and we look to TV like “Severance” for escape. ♦