By Coren Feldman and Josh Logue
The AppleTV show Severance is a Sci-Fi Drama about a company that has developed the technology to separate people's consciousness between work and regular life. It follows several such employees as they slowly unravel the mystery around the company they work for.
To discuss this show we are joined by Josh Logue, temporarily separated from the game Red Dead Redemption.
J: Hi, Coren! Before we start, can I get you anything? A soda? Water?
C: You know full well we don’t have any soda.
J: I have soda. I can get it right now.
C: Do it.
Narrator: Josh did indeed produce a coke can.
J: OK! Let’s talk about this TV show!
C: So I feel like everything I’ve seen about it has been pretty glowing. I don’t agree with it, but I do think the show has several strong elements that give it the air of a good show: The premise is interesting, the acting and directing is great and the cinematography is compelling. If you squint it almost looks like a good show.
J: I mean I don’t want to outright call it bad yet, but I agree in the sense that this is one of the most infuriating kinds of shows you can watch because you can see so much potential in it, but it mishandles a lot of fundamental elements.
C: The thing that stands out to me the most is that the show is begging you to take it seriously but has consistent extremely silly moments in a way that’s not like, a tonal choice, but just dissonant and uncomfortable.
J: Yeah. I would argue this show commits two cardinal sins, and one of them is tonal dissonance. Which usually isn’t something I like complaining about. I think shows should be weird and shift their tone around, but in this case, it’s trying some of the time to be a show about people with feelings and trauma and stuff they’re working through and the next moment they’re holding a jazz party for their cult company boss guy. It doesn’t make sense, and it undercuts the serious emotional side of the story they’re trying to push. The silly bits sabotage the serious intentions.
C: I think another big issue the show has is that it doesn’t have strong internal logic and seemingly contradicts itself often. They have this concept of people being severed, their work selves not knowing their outside life and vice versa, but they never fully explain what that means: What basic human things do you know? Can you drive a car and you just don’t have the memory of doing it? It makes it hard to understand what these characters are going through when it’s not clear what they know.
J: I hear that, but it doesn't bother me as much. It’s a very big idea, and I don’t think they really need to explain or get into all sides of it, but they do need to I guess pick up certain elements of the idea with purpose and then pay that off, which it feels like the show didn’t really do? I dunno.
C: I think having just seen the finale it’s pretty clear that what happened was what they were thinking of the whole season, but looking back, basically nothing that happened until now mattered at all. There were huge things that happened to the characters throughout the season that they immediately dropped in ways that made no sense, for example, a near death experience is clearly no longer on a character’s mind an episode or two later.
J: Yeah. That finale super felt like the Point of the season, which made the middle episodes in retrospect feel not just slow, which is how we talked about them before having seen the finale, but like straight up filler because all they really had to say for the whole season happened in the finale.
C: And it’s not a bad episode, too, but it definitely doesn’t justify the whole season slowly and mysteriously ambling towards it without purpose.
J: For sure. And that feels like a thing we see all the time in streaming shows. That they aren’t quite able to handle the middle part of their story. BUT I have a different question for you right now, which is this: show quality aside, it raises a bunch of ideas about who we are and how we relate to our own brains and identities. Did any part of that side of the show stand out to you? Did it make you think about your own identity and consciousness?
C: I think probably the thing it does best is show how experiences shape who you are. If you were to wipe someone’s brain and put them in a new environment they wouldn’t end up the same person.
J: Do you think that’s true? Are you one brain wipe away from being a huge Tyler Perry fan?
C: Dear god I hope not. But maybe! That’s the actual interesting thing here. What makes us who we are and what drives the decisions we make.
J: First of all, we capitalize the word God in this household.
C: 🙄
C: What, high level, would you say to the writer’s room of this show, if you had to distill your feedback?
J: That’s a good question. I just wish this show felt more grounded. I feel like all of the stuff it’s trying to deal with and points it’s trying to make would work better if the whole world felt like a real one that you or I might live in, and correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t stumble into a room full of lambs at the end of a hall after a difficult day at the office. It just doesn’t happen.
C: Oh god I forgot about that. And they never explained it, too.
J: And what’s especially annoying is that there are real-life examples of cults built around CEOs that you can point to now that don’t have any of this silliness. Twitter is full of actual fawners over Elon Musk. It undercuts any message you might have about corporate idiocy if you portray it as cartoony when we see day to day that it’s real and not a cartoon at all. The thing the show is criticizing isn’t real, but it’s next to something that’s real, and it should have targeted the real thing.
C: Would you watch a second season?
J: Good question. The finale was good enough to make me want to check in again, at least for one or two episodes. But the show has to win me over.
C: Yeah. I feel like I’m just curious on a writing level where they’re headed but I really don’t want to watch another full season of extremely slow exposition with characters in a sterile room. But I did get a coke out of it, so I’ve got that going for me.
J: Excellent. Let’s do this again next year.
Coren logged out of the chat.
J: I wish I had a coke.
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| Coren Feldman is the founder of CorenTV and the owner of a brand new can of Coke. They're not sponsoring this. Could you imagine?? |
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| Josh Logue is also the founder of CorenTV but was ousted Zuckerberg-style. So far Aaron Sorkin has not responded to purchasing the film rights. |