Apple TV’s “Severance” Seems to Be Arguing for Platonic Ideals in an Ideal-Less World

by Ted Kluck

Most of the negative reviews/essays I’ve read of “Severance” (Adam Scott, Christopher Walken, Apple TV) pan it as “banal” or “slow” or “implausible.”  None of those pejoratives has ever stopped me from enjoying something and I’m enjoying “Severance” very, very much. 

Regarding plausibility: “Severance” is a show set in an indiscriminate but “now-ish” time period (though they all drive 90s-ish cars) and in indiscriminately chilly and sunless northeast-ish town, in an unspeakably cool-looking mid-century-ish office building complete with one of those bas-relief Russian-dictator head portraits which is like four stories tall and lives in the building’s lobby and about which people say vaguely worshipful and cultish things.  Plausible (in that it has happened already). 

“Severance” deals primarily with the temptation to want to sort of “zonk out” (in the show’s case, surgically) and in doing so remove from your life all the attendant pain/grief/awkwardness that comes from life in a fallen world, vs. fully living your life and taking on the challenge of working well as unto the Lord, and grieving but not like those who have no hope.  Again, plausible, given that we live in the golden age of zonk-out culture (take a spin down any main drag in any weed-legal city/state) and probably aren’t too terribly far away from being able to do it surgically, somehow. 

This is where it’s important to say that “Severance” is a fully-secular show and doesn’t deal with things in terms of “working as unto the Lord” and “grieving but not like those who have no hope.”  Those are terms I deal in but only because of Christ.