Severance (created by Dan Erickson, 2022)

The Mr. and I zipped through Severance on Apple TV. I'll start with the bad, end with the good, and then I have a question. I'll speak in generalities to avoid SPOILERS.

Bad: 

1. One of my many problems with TV is that it's near impossible to discuss a series without spoilers. That's the case with some films but it's magnified with TV because the stories go on FOREVER.

2. Speaking of which, no matter how intense the final episode was, it still doesn't wrap shit up, yet another problem I have with TV. Life is short. I don't want to wait a year or two for the perpetual second act!

3. Why in GAY hell did the creators have to append a hetero escape clause to the office scenes at the last damn minute and pretty randomly, almost rotely? The surface narrative already hinges on the hetero as made clear by the very last line of the entire season. So why is it necessary in BOTH worlds? Oh yeah - to generate stories, right? How about generating DIFFERENT DAMN STORIES, though? Work isn't enough of a story generator?!? Gimme process, institutions, work, WERK! ARGH!!!!!!!!! 

4. Will historians 1,000 years from now be able to tell the difference between the final episode, directed by Ben Stiller, and the bomb defusal skit from the (great!) Ben Stiller Show? Does history repeat itself first as farce, then as standard operating procedure?

Good:

1. Set design? Chef's kiss-plus, especially its role in the many decentered compositions, e.g., a character squeezed into one slice of the frame by the nothingness of an office divider or wall.

2. GENERALIZED SPOILER. It was canny for the creators to dive into being severed from non-work life because so many spheres of our lives are, to borrow a phrase from the show, emotionally inconvenient for us. As such, this series would pair quite nicely with The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021).

3. The final episode was as hilarious and it was nail-biting, a difficult trick to pull off. So if someone asked me to relate Severance to film, I would posit that it is a mixture of Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) with just a dash of Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999).

4. I might be Captain Obvious here is but Dylan George (Zach Cherry) is the hero of the series.

Question and GENERALIZED SPOILER:

Why does a certain higher-up freak out that severance may be unraveling at the end of the season when she has already exhibited rage over being fired?