Out of all the media I have watched, I hesitate to pick a favorite. I have great affection for the mediums of cinema and television, and there have been many pieces of media that I would say have deeply impacted my own thought processes and life. That being said, for two years, I have never quite been able to get the show Severance off my mind, and I continue to think about it even as the show goes on hiatus to film its third season.
Though the show itself premiered when I was in middle school, I had for years maintained a long-standing quiet affair with sci-fi, keeping up with releases online and secretly watching trailers in my free time after school. Science fiction's ability to flip the nature of reality, society, and humanity on its head has always captivated me, and it seemed to have a particular way of allowing me to process and understand my own struggles. Despite this, I was always embarrassed of my own fascination with the genre, the fandom around it always seemed hostile, deeply obsessed, and exclusionary in my mind. My skin crawled at the idea of being judged, being watched, or, heaven forbid, being left behind. I could not face my own passion. I hid.
The thing that finally pushed me into watching the show was its intro sequence and the craftsmanship it announced. For the opening, the show hired a VFX artist found off of Instagram, who created a surreal sequence meant to convey the show's themes, concepts, and core struggles in an artistic and, most likely, creatively agonizing way. This was my first exposure to the show, and I was immediately hooked by the clear struggle it demonstrated. I wanted to reach out into the screen, pull the sequence out, and scan it like a petri dish under a microscope, scanning every intricacy, enough that I eventually told my mother about the show and had us both watch it.
The show itself depicts a dystopian corporation that splits the self into two halves. A persona meant for outside life (the "Outie") and a persona meant solely to carry out work in the office (the "Innie"), effectively trapping both selves in ignorance regarding the other's life. The offices themselves are just as unnerving as the show's concept, run by seemingly emotionless higher-ups and a deeply disturbing ideology. The people who choose to work at this corporation are often desperate, struggling, or emotionally strained, willing to look past the cloudy front of the corporation to continue to survive. As the show goes on, characters learn to question the world they experience, with the corporation going to odder and more extreme lengths to prevent the truth from escaping.
It is, in short, a world informed by the desperation, deprivation, and loneliness of our own, with a story that at its core chooses to spit in the face and fight against that reality. The show does not pretend the fight is winnable; it does not pretend that fighting alone will suffice; it does not pretend that being seen is safe. What it does insist on is that fighting is still the right verb. That a self worth having is a self worth reaching for, even in a hallway with fluorescent lights and no windows.
While the show's core concepts have struggled somewhat after its success, particularly with increasing audience pressure and some loss of narrative focus, it still remains the show that captivated me as a young teenager. Ultimately, Severance is one of the first shows that allowed me to embrace my love of sci-fi and the strange, and embrace the quirks of my personality in an entirely new way. Something I had been hiding turned out to be a door.
I look forward to seeing its third season, even if it happens to come out well after I have retired to a remote farmhouse in a vaguely English countryside.
