This week I watched almost all of the first season of Dexter. I had tried to watch it a long time ago and it didn’t take. I found it pretty easy to get into this time around. I have already moved onto season 2. It is a show where the brain can be turned off and you can kinda just let it wash over you.
Instead of watching an obscure show from the mid-2000’s I had considered binge watching the first season of Severance while I am in the midst of watching the second season. I still may do it.
It has been awesome to watch the new episode of Severance on Apple TV+ every Friday. The show has great writing and looks amazing. This season has been all about vibe… hasn’t been a lot of plot to hang onto. It lacks a feeling of forward momentum. I don’t remember the first season feeling sluggish, but I also binge-watched that. The ability to watch all episodes at once really changes one’s perception of the pace of the show. I’m surprised Severance has managed to become so widely popular. It is easy to see how viewers could get bored with the pace.
With Severance there are some really large-scale questions that need to be answered. We still don’t really know where it is going or what story it is trying to tell. There are a lot of interesting ideas to explore. I have latched onto the overall concept of the work persona vs the home persona. I believe we all create separate personalities to suit work life and home life.1 This doesn’t mean we are different people, but we accentuate different aspects of our personality depending on the situation.
Severance is making that disconnect literal. I think it is clever how they have concieved of a way to have the workers inhabit the same physical bodies but have created completely different identities. It is interesting that the innies and outies have awareness of one another, but no shared knowledge. What would it be like to be an innie? That is wild to me.
The concept of Mark S.’s re-integration is going to be interesting for us to see how those separate personas try to coexist with one another… if that is in fact what is going to happen. Mark S. is going to have to figure out how to be like all of the workers who go to a corporate job every day. Mark S’s situation is more complicated, but I think it will be compelling to see him deal with that challenge.
I have worked at a corporation for almost 20 years. My sense is that over time I have been able to be more of my authentic self during the workday. I have proven my knowledge and quality of work. I have formed relationships with people This has created an environment of confidence and safety to be myself at my job. I think of it as a positive that my work-self and home-self have merged more into the same person.
The other interpretation would be that my work-self has grown and come to define more of my “true” identity. Work has consumed so much of my time and mental capacity that my home-self has morphed to be more like my work self. That explaination feels less positive. I suppose they both are true to some extent. It is very easy to think about attributes of my own “innie” & “outie”. I can identify how they are the same and how they are different. I typically come away from the show thinking myself.
I am seeing a lot of speculation online about what it all means. What are they doing with the numbers? What is Cold Harbor? Why are there goats? Are they cloning people?
I do think we will get answers to some of those questions. However, I have felt that the point of the show is that these office workers are sitting at their desks for hours a day doing something completely banal and meaningless. Something they don’t understand the value of. That is the joke. That is the commentary on corporate America. If everything they are doing has some grand meaning it will undermine the message in my mind.
I am not expecting to get a satisfying ending to this story.
1: also friend groups, family, etc…
Filed Under: Apple TV+, Drama, Severance