Severance Is the Best Show on Apple TV
Severance. Courtesy of Apple TV Plus.
Apple’s fledgling streaming service doesn’t have a lot of content yet, and some of the big stuff it has put out, like its adaptation of Isaac Asmiov’s Foundation, was not great. But they are starting to build what I feel is a very strong base of high-concept, terrifically acted prestige series like Pachinko, a gorgeous adaptation of a New York Times bestseller about a Korean family that spans generations. But the thing that sealed it for me, and has really given me faith in Apple’s ability to use its unlimited gobs of money to make not just good but excellent content, is Severance, an old fashioned sci-fi mind-bender from Ben Stiller.
Severance is not flashy. It doesn’t have any huge stars. It has basically two locations: a floor in an office building, and a quiet little town in what looks like Minnesota or something. It is the quintessential example of a slow burn, with long periods in which basically nothing happens. And yet it is utterly gripping. This is because it does the basics right, taking a high-concept science fiction premise and thoroughly milking it to explore all of the bizarre, disturbing and compelling implications.
It gets the basic story-telling so right, with the writing, acting and character beats coming together so effortlessly that by the final episode we are on the edge of our seats not because we are being hit over the head with razzle-dazzle, but because the way the show is constructed has you completely invested in the characters and the story.
The basic premise is that in some alternate reality, a technology exists where people can split their minds in two: one mind (including fully formed personality) for work, and one for home. The work self has no memory or knowledge of what the outside self does and vice versa. It takes the concept of work-life balance to the extreme, and then it explores the implications, including the dark ones, in really smart and clever ways like any great sci-fi.
I think we forget sometimes that science fiction is not really space operas and Star Wars. At heart, it’s a genre that uses ideas to explore the intersection of science, technology and society. A really good idea can get so much mileage in science fiction, and you don’t need to throw hundreds of millions of dollars and CGI spectacle at it. Severance is good hard sci-fi in that classic, Philip K. Dick tradition where it just takes a weird, interesting idea and runs with it.
The show explores this hard sci-fi concept in many ways, but I’ll just highlight two things here because they illustrate how good story-telling can be used to push conceptual boundaries in subtle ways. The first is the acting. There are four main characters who have been severed (Adam Scott, Britt Lower, John Turturro & Zach Cherry). That means each actor is playing two characters: their office self, and their outside self.
Mostly we see Adam Scott doing double duty, and he gives a phenomenally under-stated performance where each version of himself, in the office and out, has layer upon layer. He’s very good at showing different sides or iterations of a single core person, and everything that means. Another stand-out is Tramell Tillman, who is the office supervisor but is not severed. His performance in this show is brilliantly unnerving, giving off this outwardly calm and jovial vibe that comes across as utterly sinister. The show works, in large part, because the actors help sell the concept. There’s a whole cult-like mythology and Scientology undertone to the workplace and all of that history and world-building is baked into the actors performances. It’s a masterclass in great, subtle acting.
The other thing that sells the concept is the production design. As I said, it’s not flashy, there’s not a lot of locations, but the entire world is carefully and impeccably built. World-building, when done right, is everything. It immerses the viewer, it communicates things about the show and the characters and the world they live in and saves on clunky exposition. Other streaming shows that had their world-building handed to them have dropped the ball, so I was very pleased with how subtle production design touches were used to maximum effect in Severance.
For instance, everyone has modern cell phones, but they also appear to drive cars from the 1980s. In the office itself, the computer equipment has this 1970s look, and a lot of subtle touches are used to suggest we’re in some kind of Otherworld. The space is too big, filled with too few furnishings; it’s overly bright; the equipment is wrong. All of this comes together to create a pitch-perfect dystopian vibe. You know something is wrong because it looks wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on it, because it also looks ordinary.
Getting that balance right is a testament to all the basics the show does so well, because it is visually conveying so much information and helping set the tone, without being obvious about it. Clever, subtle and completely gripping. That just about sums up Severance (which ends on a pitch perfect cliffhanger which it feels, in retrospect, like the narrative was just carefully and inexorably building toward the whole time) and helps to make it surely the best show on Apply TV, if not the best streaming show we have seen in a long long time.
