I've whittled down my streaming subscriptions to just a single one over the last year, and that's Apple TV+. It has a fair few advantages, from a reasonable price for 4K quality to a more limited catalogue that makes it easier to pick my next show - making it the best streaming service out there, for my money.
Still, the real reason I'm still subscribed is because of shows like Severance, the sci-fi bolt from the blue that gripped a whole heap of viewers when its first season dropped in 2022. It's probably the best show I've watched on Apple TV+, among some stiff competition. Now its second season is only a few months away, and the first proper trailer just dropped.
It looks like we'll be diving back into the blank corporate spaces of Lumon's underbelly, as Mark (Adam is reintegrated into the workspace - complete with a blank-faced set of new colleagues who seemingly know him well. The trailer ends with a classic bit of shenanigans from Milchick (Tramell Tillman), greeting Mark with an unfamiliar name, a cake and balloons with his face on them.
So, does this mean that Lumon is trying to bulldoze through the revelations made late in the first season of Severance? Is Mark sprinting around with the aim of finding his old colleagues to help break them out, or has he been duped into more servile compliance?
It's the sort of excellent trailer that leaves a lot up in the air, and doesn't just spoil big chunks of the season's over-arching plot, which makes me pretty happy. Still, there's clearly a great deal that we don't know, and plenty of time before the show returns on 17 January.
I can also be confident in predicting that the show will be delving deeper into its core questions of work-life balance and ethics, as we hopefully find out a bit more about what Lumon actually does. This dovetails with the central mystery of how the severance procedure works, and whether it actually does work as it's described.
That blend of philosophy with immediate tension and even dread was why Severance gripped me so much in its first season - I can't wait to dive into the second.
