"Severance," which premiered Friday on Apple TV+, is a vexing near-future science-fiction mystery with overtones of a corporate conspiracy thriller.
Created by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, it shares narrative or aesthetic notions with works as diverse as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Office Space," "Awake" (in which a detective awakens to a different life when he goes to sleep in another) and "Counterpart" (the dual-reality J.K. Simmons spy show), with maybe a little "Alphaville" mixed in.
Adam Scott plays Mark, who works for a company called Lumon, whose purpose is no more clear than the work he does there. The impossible gimmick at the heart of the series is a procedure called "severance," by which one's workplace consciousness is surgically divided from the rest of one's life, and vice versa. When Mark steps off the elevator on "the severed floor" at the start of the workday, he forgets who he is outside; when he steps off the elevator at the end of the day, he forgets what he does, and whom he knows, at work. The fictional mechanics of this are fairly well worked out, and well explained, with additional technologies written in to keep the "Innies," as the work-conscious workers are called, from communicating with the "Outies," as their other, one would say original, selves are called.
