The Severance season finale is a culmination of workplace angst by Joe Constance read by Megan Trout. About half way into the eighth episode of Severance, one of the show's main characters is rewarded with a waffle party for being a top performer. It's the highest perk available to the staff of Macro Data Refinement, the department of lumin Industries that employs the series protagonists, and includes both fresh Belgian waffles and a sensuous dance performed by figures dressed as the four tempers Dread, Woe, frolic, and malice. Modern work Severance seems to argue, is both a prison of pressure and a theater of the absurd. The artful exploration of that dichotomy has earned Severance, which aired its season two finale on Apple TV Plus this week, glowing reviews and a handful of Emmys. But the show's true genius is how it builds on a long history of the office in fiction, television, and movies, revealing a growing mistrust between employees and the executives who define their worth and dictate their work life balance. As different aspects of our life change, science fiction rises up to deal with it, said Jerry Canavan, an English professor at Marquette University who studies the genre. In Severance, they have no idea what they're doing or why they're doing it, and they never get to leave from their interior perspective. They work forever. I think that's something that people can really relate to. Severance rests on a simple premise, what if you could split your work self from your after hour's self. The four main characters undergo a procedure that does just that. They're innis live their entire conscious lives within the confines of the office while they're oudies excise the nine to five time slot from their awareness entirely. If that sounds nice to you, you're not alone. The characters chose to have a literal chip put in their heads by lumin Industries, and if it sounds like corporate overreach, you're an wrong. The chip affords the company far more control than their employees likely bargained for. The worker's innies are also trapped in a windowless, underground office which menaces its captives with low drop ceilings, fluorescent lighting, and garish green carpeting. The major anxiety the show embodies is this complete lack of autonomy at work, says Sheryl Vint, an English professor at the University of California at Riverside who studies speculative fiction. One of the show's characters spends the first two maybe three episodes trying to escape, and there's no escape. Vince says, you just have to be in the office no matter what, and they don't even know what they're doing or why. This sense of absurdity is a through line in the workplace genre. Upon being asked to do his job, the titular anti hero in Herman Melville's eighteen fifty three short story Bartleby, the Scrivener, confounds his boss with the indifferent I would prefer not to. In nineteen seventies British sickcom The Fallen Rise of Reginald Perrin, the protagonists Off the Wall Hallucinations show a man driven mad by the banality of his work at Sunshine Desserts. In the nineteen ninety nine Colt classic Being John Malkovich, the inanity of office life is felt in the stupidly low ceilings of the seven and a half Floor. Severance, too, leans into the surreal housed in Lumen's otherwise antiseptic office complex is a goat room where characters Mark and Helly find a herd of the animals tended to by mammalians nurturable department workers. When the four Macro data refiners go on an o RTBO outdoor retreat and team building occurrence to Deeter Egan National Forest, a series of creepy and unexplained doppelgangers, one for each refiner, materialize to guide them through the frozen tundra. These moments serve to acknowledge the out of body experiences many office workers have in the middle of a work day, brought on by some new senseless procedure or a fresh variant of corporate doublespeak. The premise itself was inspired by Severance creator Dan Eriksson's experience working in the basement office of a door factory. I was walking into work one day. It was nine AM, and I literally just had the thought, like God, what if I could jump ahead and suddenly it would be five and I would have done the day's work, but I wouldn't have had to experience it. Ericson said on the Severance podcast, I could just cut out that eight hours as a workplace drama. Severance shares some DNA with nineteen nineties slacker rebellion flicks see Office Space's famous printer scene or fight clubs Can I Get the Icon in Cornflower Blue? But the show also heralds a dystopian turn in the genre, joining a growing number of books, movies, and TV shows that explore the darker side of capitalism. In an episode of the British TV show Black Mirror titled fifteen Million Merits, people live out their lives in facilities where they earn earn merits by riding stationary bicycles, a neat emblem of pointlessness, while consuming content every waking moment. In the twenty eighteen film Sorry to Bother You, Cassius cash Grain is recruited to telemarket Worry Free, a company that profits off rebranded slave labor, after rocketing through the ranks at a Compton based call center using his white voice. Dave Egger's twenty thirteen novel The Circle depicts the sprawling campus of a tech company intent on achieving total global surveillance. The protagonist in Ling Ma's twenty eighteen novel Severance, no relation to the show, continues showing up to her office job well after a pandemic has infected much of the world's population with a zombie virus. This ominous turn is a stark departure from the hunky dory office sitcoms of the early oughts, including TV shows like The Office two thousand and five to twenty thirteen and Parks in Recreation two thousand nine to twenty fifteen, also starring several says Adam Scott, those ensemble casts operate like misfit families, and the episodes focus almost entirely on their relationships, mishaps, and personality clashes, rather than the existential conundrums of their work. The lead characters, in severance, by contrast, bring only part of themselves to the office. The workplace genre took a notable turn towards cynicism following the two thousand and eight financial crash, whose aftermath produced bleak works like Jason Rightman's two thousand and nine film Up in the Air, about a traveling consultant who conducts mass layoffs on behalf of employers, and John Wells's twenty ten movie The Company Men, in which a laid off executive loses the accouterments his income afforded. Severance, too, is deeply cynical about corporations, whose misguided attempts at employee satisfaction inform much of the show's humor. Luman rewards its staff with erasers, Chinese finger traps, and carts laden with bowls of melon balls. When the Macro data refiners activate the overtime contingency at the end of season one, a setting that allows their any to take over after hours, they are shown a stop motion short voiced by Keanu Reeves that describes Luman as the provider of tasty new snacks like fruit, leather cut beans, Christmas mints, and salsa, as well as incentives such as pineapple bobbing and a room full of fun house mirrors and chow. A former chief executive officer of AT and T Business who watches Severance identifies COVID nineteen as another inflection point in our ideas about work. The pandemic forced companies and individuals into survival mode and expose the chasms between rank and file workers and executives. With vacation homes and hired help. The ensuing returned to office battle further deepened divisions. We lost sight of our common purpose common values, common signature on the paycheck, common badge. These are the things that unified us as teams, says Chow. Her father worked at Bell Labs, the historic office complex where Severance was filmed. That detachment that Severance almost between employer and employee has put the two at odds. Those dynamics played out on the set of the show, which began filming in November twenty twenty and saw a second season production temporarily halted in twenty twenty three by the Writer's Guild of America strike During the heart of the pandemic. I saw our crew and everybody's attitudes towards work, questions of how hard and long we work, hours that take us away from families and priorities. It shifted, said Ben Stiller, Severance's executive producer and director, in an interview with Inverse magazine. A lot of good has come out of that questioning and what we've seen as the status quo, how hard and long they're supposed to work to what end. While the show's second season does little to answer that question for its four leading characters, it does reinforce the importance of the connections that can be made even in the absence of such clarity, the macro data refiners form deep bonds on par with the TV Workplace ensembles that have come before work may feel at times absurd and pointless, the show suggests, but life in an office still counts as real life, even if it's fluorescently lit.

The Severance season finale is a culmination of workplace angst by Joe Constance read by Megan Trout. About half way into the eighth episode of Severance, one of the show's main characters is rewarded with a waffle party for being a top performer. It's the highest perk available to the staff of Macro Data Refinement, the department of lumin Industries that employs the series protagonists, and includes both fresh Belgian waffles and a sensuous dance performed by figures dressed as the four tempers Dread, Woe, frolic, and malice. Modern work Severance seems to argue, is both a prison of pressure and a theater of the absurd. The artful exploration of that dichotomy has earned Severance, which aired its season two finale on Apple TV Plus this week, glowing reviews and a handful of Emmys. But the show's true genius is how it builds on a long history of the office in fiction, television, and movies, revealing a growing mistrust between employees and the executives who define their worth and dictate their work life balance. As different aspects of our life change, science fiction rises up to deal with it, said Jerry Canavan, an English professor at Marquette University who studies the genre. In Severance, they have no idea what they're doing or why they're doing it, and they never get to leave from their interior perspective. They work forever. I think that's something that people can really relate to. Severance rests on a simple premise, what if you could split your work self from your after hour's self. The four main characters undergo a procedure that does just that. They're innis live their entire conscious lives within the confines of the office while they're oudies excise the nine to five time slot from their awareness entirely. If that sounds nice to you, you're not alone. The characters chose to have a literal chip put in their heads by lumin Industries, and if it sounds like corporate overreach, you're an wrong. The chip affords the company far more control than their employees likely bargained for. The worker's innies are also trapped in a windowless, underground office which menaces its captives with low drop ceilings, fluorescent lighting, and garish green carpeting. The major anxiety the show embodies is this complete lack of autonomy at work, says Sheryl Vint, an English professor at the University of California at Riverside who studies speculative fiction. One of the show's characters spends the first two maybe three episodes trying to escape, and there's no escape. Vince says, you just have to be in the office no matter what, and they don't even know what they're doing or why. This sense of absurdity is a through line in the workplace genre. Upon being asked to do his job, the titular anti hero in Herman Melville's eighteen fifty three short story Bartleby, the Scrivener, confounds his boss with the indifferent I would prefer not to. In nineteen seventies British sickcom The Fallen Rise of Reginald Perrin, the protagonists Off the Wall Hallucinations show a man driven mad by the banality of his work at Sunshine Desserts. In the nineteen ninety nine Colt classic Being John Malkovich, the inanity of office life is felt in the stupidly low ceilings of the seven and a half Floor. Severance, too, leans into the surreal housed in Lumen's otherwise antiseptic office complex is a goat room where characters Mark and Helly find a herd of the animals tended to by mammalians nurturable department workers. When the four Macro data refiners go on an o RTBO outdoor retreat and team building occurrence to Deeter Egan National Forest, a series of creepy and unexplained doppelgangers, one for each refiner, materialize to guide them through the frozen tundra. These moments serve to acknowledge the out of body experiences many office workers have in the middle of a work day, brought on by some new senseless procedure or a fresh variant of corporate doublespeak. The premise itself was inspired by Severance creator Dan Eriksson's experience working in the basement office of a door factory. I was walking into work one day. It was nine AM, and I literally just had the thought, like God, what if I could jump ahead and suddenly it would be five and I would have done the day's work, but I wouldn't have had to experience it. Ericson said on the Severance podcast, I could just cut out that eight hours as a workplace drama. Severance shares some DNA with nineteen nineties slacker rebellion flicks see Office Space's famous printer scene or fight clubs Can I Get the Icon in Cornflower Blue? But the show also heralds a dystopian turn in the genre, joining a growing number of books, movies, and TV shows that explore the darker side of capitalism. In an episode of the British TV show Black Mirror titled fifteen Million Merits, people live out their lives in facilities where they earn earn merits by riding stationary bicycles, a neat emblem of pointlessness, while consuming content every waking moment. In the twenty eighteen film Sorry to Bother You, Cassius cash Grain is recruited to telemarket Worry Free, a company that profits off rebranded slave labor, after rocketing through the ranks at a Compton based call center using his white voice. Dave Egger's twenty thirteen novel The Circle depicts the sprawling campus of a tech company intent on achieving total global surveillance. The protagonist in Ling Ma's twenty eighteen novel Severance, no relation to the show, continues showing up to her office job well after a pandemic has infected much of the world's population with a zombie virus. This ominous turn is a stark departure from the hunky dory office sitcoms of the early oughts, including TV shows like The Office two thousand and five to twenty thirteen and Parks in Recreation two thousand nine to twenty fifteen, also starring several says Adam Scott, those ensemble casts operate like misfit families, and the episodes focus almost entirely on their relationships, mishaps, and personality clashes, rather than the existential conundrums of their work. The lead characters, in severance, by contrast, bring only part of themselves to the office. The workplace genre took a notable turn towards cynicism following the two thousand and eight financial crash, whose aftermath produced bleak works like Jason Rightman's two thousand and nine film Up in the Air, about a traveling consultant who conducts mass layoffs on behalf of employers, and John Wells's twenty ten movie The Company Men, in which a laid off executive loses the accouterments his income afforded. Severance, too, is deeply cynical about corporations, whose misguided attempts at employee satisfaction inform much of the show's humor. Luman rewards its staff with erasers, Chinese finger traps, and carts laden with bowls of melon balls. When the Macro data refiners activate the overtime contingency at the end of season one, a setting that allows their any to take over after hours, they are shown a stop motion short voiced by Keanu Reeves that describes Luman as the provider of tasty new snacks like fruit, leather cut beans, Christmas mints, and salsa, as well as incentives such as pineapple bobbing and a room full of fun house mirrors and chow. A former chief executive officer of AT and T Business who watches Severance identifies COVID nineteen as another inflection point in our ideas about work. The pandemic forced companies and individuals into survival mode and expose the chasms between rank and file workers and executives. With vacation homes and hired help. The ensuing returned to office battle further deepened divisions. We lost sight of our common purpose common values, common signature on the paycheck, common badge. These are the things that unified us as teams, says Chow. Her father worked at Bell Labs, the historic office complex where Severance was filmed. That detachment that Severance almost between employer and employee has put the two at odds. Those dynamics played out on the set of the show, which began filming in November twenty twenty and saw a second season production temporarily halted in twenty twenty three by the Writer's Guild of America strike During the heart of the pandemic. I saw our crew and everybody's attitudes towards work, questions of how hard and long we work, hours that take us away from families and priorities. It shifted, said Ben Stiller, Severance's executive producer and director, in an interview with Inverse magazine. A lot of good has come out of that questioning and what we've seen as the status quo, how hard and long they're supposed to work to what end. While the show's second season does little to answer that question for its four leading characters, it does reinforce the importance of the connections that can be made even in the absence of such clarity, the macro data refiners form deep bonds on par with the TV Workplace ensembles that have come before work may feel at times absurd and pointless, the show suggests, but life in an office still counts as real life, even if it's fluorescently lit.