A remarkable mix of blackly comic character comedy,workplace thriller,and a bittersweet meditation on identity,the series is initially set in the secure basement of an American corporation facility named Lumon. Thanks to a chip embedded in their heads,staff who descend the elevator each morning have their memories divided. At work they have no memory of the outside world,not even their name or relationship status. At home they have no idea what happens while they work. Each existence is a blank to the other. They’ve been severed.
Adam Scott plays the dutiful employee of a mysterious company in the black comedy Severance.Atsushi Nishijima
For American actor Adam Scott,who plays central character Mark S,the initially dutiful section head of a severed work team,the series is a vision of what tomorrow’s uncertain workplace could be. But now that Tesla founder Elon Musk has been hyping Neuralink,his company that plans to use computer chips embedded in the brain to initially help the paralysed move and eventually store memories,Severance no longer sounds far-fetched. After all,Musk’s start-up is ready to start clinical trials with human subjects.
“It’s not a joke. It’s true,” says Scott,whose previous credits includeParks and Recreation,Party Down,andBig Little Lies. “These companies need to keep the widgets going down the line at any cost and want to be more and more ingrained in our daily lives. We’re all those frogs in slowly boiling water with how far we let all of this to go. The world ofSeverance is not far around the corner. Maybe.”
For much ofSeverance,the audience is in the dark. Mark and his team – Irving (John Turturro),Dylan (Zach Cherry),and despairing newcomer Helly (Britt Lower) – don’t understand what they do as the Macrodata Refinement team,have no contact with other departments,and can only fantasise about how their “outies” live outside the office. They are foundlings,and their predicament is revealed with obtuse circumstances and deadpan dialogue. ImagineThe Office rewritten byInfinite Jest author David Foster Wallace.
“It’s hard to think you could say,‘Oh,this reminds me of David Foster Wallace’ in the days of network TV,” Scott says. “It’s a really smart show that is assuming the intelligence of the audience. It doesn’t talk down to them at all. It was unlike anything else I’ve worked on in terms of how it felt and the degree of difficulty it had.”
“Unexpected” and “challenging” are the words Scott uses often to explainSeverance. The show’s creator,Dan Erickson,was a Hollywood neophyte without a single credit when his pilot script first became the subject of intense interest in 2016. Red Hour,the production company of actor and filmmaker Ben Stiller,took up the project,making a deal with Apple TV. After the signing,Erickson had to finish his shift as a delivery driver for a popular app.
As soon as he started reading scripts Scott was smitten. Mark is an unlikely protagonist,resistant to discovery and scared of his imposing superior,Miss Cobel (Patricia Arquette). Sadness shades his diligence,so that the character feels like a continuation of Scott’s prior roles as a perplexed everyman. Then Stiller told Scott that the actor was Erickson’s model for Mark the entire time the writer was mapping outSeverance.
“I was delighted because it’s exactly the sort of show I would want to watch. It’s right up my alley,” Scott says. “The world building and the elements of science-fiction reflect our current state in the world and take it a few clicks further – looking down the periscope at where we might be going and just completely unique.”
The dark comedy dances dangerously close to reality.Wilson Webb
Defined by medicinal green tones and labyrinthine hallways,Severance is an almost otherworldly experience. But the severed concept speaks deeply to the current struggle to define the boundaries between employer and employee. Because they don’t exist outside the office,the “innies” have no public voice – they’re vulnerable outsourced labour. It’s the bridging of this existential rift that drives Mark on and defines Scott’s nuanced performance.
“It’s really important that Mark be two sides of the same person. It isn’t two different people,it’s two halves and they have to be believable as different components of the same person.” Scott says. “I had to find the differences and maintain the similarities,even as they’re in search of each other.”
Stiller,who directs six of the nine episodes,and Erickson created an immersive realm for the cast. The corporation that founded the fictional Lumon is an insular family company,complete with its own sacred texts and cult-like myths. If there was a prop book of company lore on set,the actors could open it and find text that Erickson had written purely as background detail. By the shoot’s end Scott had inadvertently become an innie:he didn’t want to stop working.
“I feel like this is the role I’ve been working towards and hoping to come along for a really long time. It took everything that I can do and took it out of me,” Scott says. “It was exciting and exhausting and fun and I was really sad when we finished. I was depressed – I needed a break,but I was really bummed out that we were done.”
Severance is on Apple TV+ from Friday,February 18.
Find out the next TV,streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. delivered every Thursday.