Severance review: Work creep and the meaning of corridors

Severance. Photo / Supplied

Greg and Zanna follow a long and winding corridor to its natural conclusion.

SCORES
Time spent in corridors: 5
Significance of corridors: 5
Agreement on meaning of corridors: 0

SHE SAW
Hollywood's compulsion to retell old stories and turn real life events into drama keeps Greg awake at night. He's passionate about originality and takes a hard line against anything he believes has a whiff of referentiality. His excitement about Severance was therefore high. Mine, based purely on the fact that it's science fiction, which I acknowledge can be brilliant but rarely gets my juices flowing, was low.

The opening sequence contained an incredibly long scene of two characters walking down endless white corridors and I was immediately turned off. "How much of this show is going to be walking down corridors, do you think?" Greg asked. It was too much already. In our post-viewing debrief Greg posited the theory that the corridors symbolised our neural pathways. He might be right. I think it was more about creating a confusing maze you can't escape. Either way, it was a lot. But, by the end of the second episode, I couldn't get enough of those blinding corridors - so much so, I broke the cardinal rule of marital television viewing and finished the series alone, while Greg lay peacefully sleeping in bed.

The premise of Severance is that people can get a chip inserted into their brain, which severs their work persona from their home persona. You become two people sharing the same body with neither persona having any knowledge of the life of the other. There's an obvious commentary here, particularly relevant during pandemic life, about the blurring of lines between work and home. I currently have a coughing 5-year-old coming in and out of my office/kitchen to ask for food. Technology has allowed work to increasingly encroach on our home lives and it's easy to imagine a world in which we - and by that I mean me - would pull the trigger on a technology that would allow us to find complete, impenetrable work/life balance.

Unfortunately, of course, it's too good to be true and the series follows a group of severed "innies", who are becoming increasingly suspicious of what it is they are actually doing for their company. They have to make a request to their "outies" to resign from the job and as their "outie" has no knowledge of what their work days are like, approval of that request is unlikely. The dynamic between the four main innies, who become a team of underdogs fighting the good fight, gets better with each episode. There are some wonderfully mysterious twists, which make the possibilities of this world expand more and more. I have to concur with Greg: the completely original premise of Severance - executed well - makes this series my favourite of the year so far.

HE SAW
It's hard to express how galling it was in the opening minutes of this show to be forced to watch 90 seconds of a man walking down a hallway. There was no context and no sense of wonder at what might happen next; just an increasing sense of anger that someone might think you might be interested in so much of this. But nine episodes and much time in these corridors later, my attitude towards the scene was changed, having been expanded and challenged by subsequent events, and I thrilled to the sound of my own voice as I expressed to my wife my theories on the thematic and narrative properties of the corridors while she looked on, sceptical and jaded, with even less interest in me than I once had in those corridors.

"It's about the human mind," I said. "Where are we at any given point? And often we think we know, because we follow established patterns. He walked an incredibly complex route from the lift to get to his office, but he's following established patterns. He doesn't actually know what's in any of these places. It's just the way that we always go. And the way we always go is not the way that's best for us."

"I'm not following that at all, sorry," she said.

"Neural pathways," I said. "The corridors in the show are neural pathways. They represent our neural pathways."

She disagreed with that, and turned the conversation away from the corridors, talking instead about how she saw the show as a commentary on the nature of work creep and our growing inability to separate work and home life. Happy to follow the path she had chosen, I added my own thoughts about the show's recognition of the dehumanising effects of work, particularly as regards power dynamics, the cult-like functioning of the modern corporation and the godlike positioning of many of its leaders. I was enjoying our interchange of ideas but apparently she wasn't, because she again changed course, saying: "More importantly, what did you like and what did you not like?"
I said, "The things we enjoy about shows are never very interesting, are they? They're always, 'What's going to happen next?'"
"Not necessarily," she said.
"What's interesting about a show," I continued, "is the things you can reflect on."
"What's interesting about you," she said, "is that you make unprovable claims and state them as facts."
Who was right? Who was wrong? That was interesting, I thought, and definitely something to reflect on. What happened next? Who cares?

Severance is streaming now on Apple TV+