Last weekend we were in binge-watching mood again and powered through the first season of Severance on AppleTV+. I didn’t know what to expect. For some reason I thought this would be some kind of office-comedy but imagine my surprise when the show turned dark very quickly!
It’s about employees at a company called “Lumon” that need to undergo a so-called “severance” procedure. Thanks to this their memory is split into an inside and an outside memory. While at work they can only access their memories from there while at home they cannot remember a thing from their time inside the “severance floor” (the floor where they work normally).
Just think about what a company could do to/with its employees if they couldn’t remember anything after leaving the office. They would be completely trapped as from the point of view of the non-working person everything is fine and they get paid!
The show has an amazing atmosphere with everything inside the company being pseudo-happy and feeling like a 1970s stereotype-workplace but completely pointless while on the outside everything is mundane. There are also some heavy cultish aspects with employees sometimes seeing the company and its founders as religious and infallible entities.
Given how Apple is seen by some folks I was extremely surprised that Severance is exclusive to AppleTV+. Good thing I still had the account there as I absolutely loved the first season! Good thing there’s another season already in the works for 2023!
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