Dystopian drama 'Severance' imagines a world of all work, no play

It’s said that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. But what kind of boy would Jack be if the problem of the balance between work and life was no longer an issue? That’s the starting point for creator Dan Erickson’s darkly comic psychological drama Severance.

Quietly resigned Mark (Adam Scott) is an employee of a fictional big tech company called Lumon Industries, which does a whole bunch of things that neither he nor we are quite sure of. Mark is part of a small team who work on the “severance floor” of Lumon.

They  have all voluntarily opted to be subject to the company’s new groundbreaking “severance surgery”, which bifurcates their work and non-work memories so that the work versions of themselves (“innies”) have no knowledge of the life, memories or considerations of their non-work selves (“outies”).

Erickson uses this dystopian twist to create a sly piece of imminently relatable satire that soon offers a frightening vision of a world where nothing is quite as it seems. In the wake of the return to some semblance of normal working conditions after the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which time the boundaries between work and home life were collapsed and turned on their head, the show’s premise has an added layer of relevance.

Largely directed by Ben Stiller, Severance slowly but surely reels you into its carefully curated, increasingly bleak vision of a world where the supposed solutions offered by technology to rid us of anxiety are in fact the super-spreaders of unbearable off-the-charts anxiety.

As Mark’s boss, the chillingly grinning Harmony Cobel tells him (as her atheist mother always used to say), “Hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is whatever humans can imagine they can usually create.”

That’s increasingly evident in the twisting  plot, which slowly begins to collapse the divisions between “innies” and “outies” to scary and provocative effect.

In an age when the sanctity of hard work is no longer as solid as advocates of it would have you believe, Severance offers us a troubling vision of a world in which all work and no play make Mark and his colleagues — excellently played by a strong supporting cast that includes John Turturro, Christopher Walken, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry and Tramell Tillman — not nearly dull enough for the liking of Lumon Industries. Luckily they’re interesting enough to keep us watching, guessing and drily laughing through the show’s Kafkaesque maze of explorations of more than just the workplace.

• 'Severance' is available on Apple TV +. New episodes are added weekly.