Dan Erickson
Severance

"Severance" is a 2022 series, lauded by critics and audience alike, because it seems that a minimalist aesthetic and some superficial reflections on capitalism are enough to be hailed as a masterpiece. The second season is airing in these early weeks of 2025 on Apple+.

The basic idea is intriguing: a mysterious company, Lumon, has found a way to separate employees' memories between work and private life, transforming them into impeccable corporate automatons. Great potential for a dramatic story exploring the mysteries of the mind. It's a pity that the script decides to take this potential, make a ball out of it and throw it in the trash, preferring to develop the plot with a mix of grotesque horror, scholastic metaphors, and textbook woke clichés, starting from the setting, where Lumon's interiors are so cold and impersonal that they seem like the sterile and neon version of hell. The outside world is instead a festival of winter gray, blurred and equally alienating. The noble art of suggestion, an unknown concept here.

The protagonist should be Mark (Adam Scott), an employee working with three colleagues, but his presence is so passive that sometimes he blends in with the furniture. When his best friend and colleague Petey mysteriously disappears, he is replaced by Helly, a first-class jerk whose only talent is causing exponentially growing problems. In the first episode, the concept of dehumanizing work is certainly effective, especially for the US audience, where large corporations swallow lives and energy. In Italy, among "entrepreneurs of themselves" and smaller companies, the idea might seem a bit less impactful.

After some ironic but predictable scenes about the nonsense of ultra-compartmentalized work, the series indulges in narrative choices that destroy the brilliant premises:

• A cannibalistic war between departments, because nothing says "smart social critique" like employees tearing each other apart
• A corporate mystery so enigmatic it seems written by someone who has no idea what should be revealed
• And especially the crumbling of the premise: the "split" doesn’t generate two amnesiac versions of the same individual but completely different people, overturning the initial concept

And since we're on the subject of questionable choices: the power here is firmly in the hands of women, but without showing them in promotional images, so as not to alarm those allergic to the woke. There's the manipulative manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette); the diabolical Helly, who happens to be the heir of Lumon; the super-intelligent rebel Reghabi; the wellness counselor Ms. Casey and Devon, Mark's pregnant sister, married to an invertebrate like all the other males in the series—dull, naive, useless, good only for falling in love with each other with adolescent shyness. Yes, because the icing on the cake is a grotesque gay love story between two shy over-60s (none other than John Turturro, 67 years old, and Christopher Walken, 81), because otherwise the show wouldn’t be inclusive enough.

Despite some scattered thriller-horror scenes with splatter suggestions thrown in because the genre is in demand, the pace is soporific, the plot coils upon itself, and already in the second season, it’s slipping into the insipid. If you want to ruin your evening, take advantage of the free trial period on Apple+, because this stuff certainly doesn’t deserve a subscription.