The timing was almost suspicious. Right as workers started shuffling back into the office at the end of the Omicron surge, Apple TV+ released a show that seemed to capture all those heightened tensions over our relationship with work, and play, and which of the two takes primacy, then condense them into one highly bingeable product. The great resignation, pre-tirement, quiet quitting: Severance seemed to anticipate the lot with such alarming clarity, you wondered whether the brains behind the show – creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller – had access to some sort of future-predicting device, perhaps one created by the show’s nefarious corporation, Lumon Industries.
OK, there’s a more likely explanation for all that prescience: the themes at the heart of Severance have pretty much always been relevant. TV has long been fascinated with humanity’s fragile relationship with work, right back to when Lucille Ball was shovelling conveyor belt chocolates into her mouth to avoid getting fired. But what Severance did was infuse those perennial concerns with some very modern ones: corporate malfeasance, data harvesting, bodily autonomy. The result was a paranoid-thriller puzzle-box mystery that recalled Lost’s stronger moments.
