Series Review: Severance, Series 1 (2022)
An astonishing original series which asks more questions than it answers
Director: Ben Stiller, Aoife McArdle et al.
Helly R.: Well, boss. I guess this is the part where I should tell you to go to hell. Except you're already here.
I’ve been recommended Severance by just about everyone, and like so many things, it misses me by for years until I finally hop on the bandwagon. Apple TV has a great reputation for science fiction stories like Silo and Foundation, but Severance is just so weird, it becomes compulsory viewing.
The premise, the cast and the plot are (unsurprisingly, for Apple) pitch perfect; but for me, it’s the extraordinary production design that stands head and shoulders above anything else I’ve seen in a long time. The graphical user interfaces; the almost-identical corridors; the vending machines; user manuals – even the artwork wheeled around by Lumon’s Optics and Design department provide me with a profound sense of aesthetic joy.
The series cliffhanger is such an extraordinary climax to a brilliant series, it serves as a timely reminder that real story telling magic resides in our imaginations: the imagined answers to questions that we don’t really need the answers to, like, what does Macro Data Refinement actually do? Or is Severed Floor a modern allegory of purgatory in late-stage capitalism?
I don’t know, and don’t want to know. I hope Series 2 makes no attempt to explain it.
This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #4.
The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.
