(Very mild) Spoilers for season 1 of Severance ahead.

First, if you haven't seen Severance, I recommend it! Bookmark this, go watch season 1, form your own opinions, and come back to chat.

Ok, people who have context for what I'm about to say, read on!

I couldn't finish the show the first time I tried. I got about half way through, but the fundamental horror of the protagonists' situation was simply too disturbing for me. Friends would say "Oh it's so great, it's so funny and weird. What a thought provoking idea!"

And I'd be sat there barely able to breathe at the idea that someone's life could be an unbroken experience of being at work, in a windowless building.

Based on these conversations, I genuinely think many people aren't actually fully imagining what's happening to the characters. It might also be because I was working as a full time employee, in front of a computer all day, during that first attempt.

Second attempt, I managed to dial down my vicarious horror enough to get through the season, and it is a great show.

Now the part I think the writers get wrong.

I think, in one important way, they also failed to fully empathize with the situation.

Mark, the main character of season 1, is presented as having chosen to become severed and work at Lumen as a way of dealing with and escape from the grief of the loss of his wife.

Superficially, this makes sense. It's a common trope, and makes psychological sense to me, that people often deal with grief by pouring themselves into work. So that, for at least those hours of the day, you have a distraction from the pain.

But getting severed would actually have the opposite effect. It would remove that tool from your life. It would mean you had one less way to escape the grief. Rather than waking up filled with grief, then going to work, and getting a few hours of relief, before going home and picking up the grief, you would wake up with the grief, head to work, and then immediately be coming home where your grief filled existence could continue, uninterrupted.

You might argue that it was Mark who missed this, when he made the choice, and now he's dealing with the consequences. But that's not in the text. What's in the text is just the implication that getting severed was Marks strategy for dealing with the grief, with no exploration of the fact that actually that's a horrible strategy.

Thoughts? Counterpoints? What did you think of the show?

(ps, I'd just like to say how delighted I am that the generated images are now optional 🙏)

television critique

Severance is great, but it gets one thing weirdly wrong.