Started Watching Severance

A new show has to have a good premise to hook a new audience. The premise of Severance follows a group of people who work at a mega-corporation called Lumon Industries. Their work is so sensitive that to get the job they've elected to undergo a surgical procedure called severance. It implants a chip that splits their memories and conscious experience between their work and personal life. As a consequence, their work selves and personal selves are effectively different people with different life experience. Their work selves never experience leaving the office.

The show follows Mark, a man who took the job to forget his dead wife part of the time. The show begins with Mark being told his best friend Petey has left the company and he is now the department head. His first task is to train a new employee, a young woman named Helly. As the episodes progress, Mark is contacted by Petey on the outside, who has had his memories reintegrated and tells Mark that the job at Lumon is sinister and he has left Mark's work self breadcrumbs to follow. But Petey experiences sickness and delusion from his reintegration and shortly dies, leaving Mark to uncover the mysteries on his own.

Meanwhile, things are not going well at work with Helly and she becomes more and more desperate to leave. While Mark tries keeping her out of trouble, he is unsuccessful and dragged further into the mysteries of Lumon.

Throughout the show does an excellent job of using primary and secondary details to drive home how creepy the situation is.

For example, the supervisory characters Milchick, Corbel, and Graner all do an excellent job of being unsettling in their own way in how the treat the severed employees. Corbel is an older woman and a rude and icy manager of the floor. Strangely, on the outside she is Mark's kindly neighbor Mrs. Selvig. Mr. Milchick is her assistant, a tall black man with a veneer of sweet words and politeness at odds with the disdain and indifference towards the desires of the workers clear in his body language. Graner is an intimidating and stone-faced security guard, always capable of appearing whenever there might be trouble.

The office environment plays into this too. Despite being a department and sitting in a large office that could fit dozens of people, there are only four main severed workers. They sit at four desks in the center of the room. The offices and hallways are always shown to be empty, a strange circumstance for a corporate office where hundreds of people work. The employees, especially the older worker Irving, treat the company founder as a prophet and quote him religiously. There's an entire wing of the company dedicated to a reconstruction of his house. More strange than that is how the nature of the work is a complete mystery even to the workers. They are given special computers that only show grids of numbers and they are instructed to sort the numbers based on the feelings they get from them. For example, category 1 numbers are stated to be scary.

Multiple times it is shown that the process of severance is ethically controversial in the world. Activists hand out petitions to ban it. News anchors debate corporate spokesmen on the morality of doing that to their workers. It is shown many times that the workers are basically slaves. They never experience life outside the office and are subject to being tortuously forced to repeat apologies for hours in the "break" room until the supervisors are satisfied for infractions against the rules.

These dilemmas make Mark defensive of his choice, claiming the separation is helping him and he did it of his own will.

I'm excited to see where the series will go from here.