Review Roundup: Severance, Season Two
With its bizarre premise — employees of a mysterious biotechnology company undergo a procedure called “severance” that splits them into two personalities, one forever trapped at work and one allowed to leave — wondrously bizarre production design, colorful cast, and skewed sense of humor, Severance was one of 2022’s biggest TV series. (For what it’s worth, my wife and I loved it.)
Unfortunately, season two was delayed by the 2023 writers strike as well as some behind-the-scenes drama. Which means that almost three years have passed since Apple TV+ first invited us into the hallowed halls of Lumon Industries. Does Apple have yet another hit on its hands? Do the “innies” discover more secrets about their strange employer? Will there be another dance party?
Read on for a selection of critics’ reactions to the new season.
Severance shows little signs of a true sophomore slump. Its storytelling suggests a long-term plan for where the show is going, and a willingness to grapple with the knotty questions about how all of these characters and personalities can interact and sustain.
When the end credits roll on this latest batch of cohesive episodes and you’re left to reflect on the beautifully orchestrated chaos, there will be no taming your tempers. A new barrage of burning questions, anxieties, heartaches, and tempting urges to quit your own job will swirl around your head. While the thought of another multi-year gap between seasons is enough to fill any fervent fan with woe, there’s no denying this wait was well worth it, so we have faith the next will be, too.
Through these characters’ struggles, this second season doubles down on its ever-present corporate commentary, highlighting how companies seek to divide workers and undercut their ability to organize and partake in collective action. And more specifically, we see the insidious ways many corporations deflect and absorb criticisms without actually fundamentally changing anything — in response to their rebellion, the innie’s complaints are acknowledged, but only in a superficial fashion that seeks to placate them instead of offering true reform.
The series grapples with questions of autonomy in often horrifying ways, asking what happens when an innie develops a different ideological perspective from their outie. It felt all but inevitable that the idea of control would have to be broached at some point, a war in the mind for ownership over the body, but how Severance explores this is both gut-wrenching and thrilling.
Severance goes further, pointing out how the most devastating effect of corporate capitalism is the way it alienates us from what might be the very best parts of ourselves. It makes for a season that’s frequently darker, less frequently amusing and not necessarily more satisfying — but one that hits, if anything, even more chillingly close to home.
Erickson, Stiller and production designer Jeremy Hindle have a knack for building setups that riff on corporations’ uncanny, infantilizing methods of control, yet feel more oblique and mysterious than straight satire. Training videos, offsite meetings and performance reviews are the latest tropes to be reflected through Lumon’s funhouse mirror. So are broader concepts like tokenization and the whitewashing of attempted revolution into sanitized propaganda.
From the start of the show, we have seen both innie and outie worlds, and so knew more about the characters than they knew about themselves. But this season we are less certain than we were — or thought we were — about some characters’ motives. What is their game, what are they hiding, and are they as united as they seem? Everyone is, at least for a while, an unreliable narrator, smartly adding suspense.
It would be one thing if Severance’s follow-up season immediately attempted to answer every lingering question viewers have. Instead, it deftly unspools an even greater and more thrilling sci-fi mystery, forcing you to realize just how deep the rabbit hole that is Lumon Industries truly goes — and making an incredibly strong case for itself as one of the best shows of the year, again.
Once again, Severance dives into dramatic themes that resonate, only for different reasons. Far beyond the eye-catching production design, which appears to be a futuristic version of modernistic design, and expert photography, Season 2 explores more intimately the depths of the human soul and how we connect to each other, with greater success than the sometimes sketchy outlines presented in Season 1.
That Severance is taking cues from shows like Lost and Westworld — shows that teased great, galaxy-brained secrets, only to drop the ball as the story dragged on — is as much a blessing as it could be a curse. And that’s especially true as it returns for another season, one that promises to be even trippier than the first.
There’s more lore for the Eaganites obsessed with how Lumon Corp came to be the frighteningly strange, eerily plausible business it’s become. There’s more time spent with the main characters’ Outies, including a particularly poignant arc for Dylan. There’s further exploration of the company’s perplexing departments, like the goat farm glimpsed in Season 1, and there’s more biting humor, even if it’s often so blunt the jokes barely register as something meant to coax out a chuckle.
Really, what season 2 proves is that Severance wasn’t a great show because it was such a surprise — it was just a great show. And at least in the first half of season 2, its quest to expand its scope hasn’t dulled any of its sharp, strange edges.
Severance’s second season begins streaming on Apple TV+ on January 17, 2025. Watch the trailer below.
