For something that reminds you by turns of Charlie Kaufman, Wes Anderson, Orwell and Kafka, plus Devs and Dollhouse and half a dozen other sci-fi series and workplace comedy-dramas, Severance (Apple TV+) is an impressively idiosyncratic thing, wholly itself and confident in its mission to make your mind implode.
This is ironic, given that the conceit of the show, directed by Ben Stiller, is essentially the bifurcating of brains. At Lumen Industries, data inputter Mark (Adam Scott, quiet inheritor of Tom Hanks’s everyman mantle) and his colleagues on “the severance floor” have all undergone a procedure that separates, absolutely, their work selves (“innies”) from their home selves (“outies”).
