Severance season two is strange, stylish and totally engrossing

In the first episode of Severance season two, a shrunken office corridor opens out into a stark white, windowless room. Inside are grassy knolls, dotted with sheep grazing under the unforgiving glare of fluorescent lights. It’s the sort of deeply strange scene viewers have come to expect from the Apple TV+ sci-fi series, which was hailed as a sharp and funny comment on office life when it was released back in 2022 – before disappearing for three years.

Finally, following Hollywood strikes, rewrites, and reshoots, Severance is back. As we now know, the severance of the title refers not to a financial payout but to a medical procedure that sees willing employees of a shadowy biotech firm, Lumon, isolate their work selves (innies) from their outer selves (outies). In effect, innies exist purely within the workplace; outies, purely outside of it. Suffice to say, the innies are getting a raw deal.

Severance easily could’ve buckled under the weight of its conceit, but has been held together by the very human connections at its heart – embodied by a superb ensemble cast led by the sweetly acquiescent Adam Scott as Mark S, an employee who opts into severance in order to forget, at least for eight hours a day, the grief of losing his wife in a car crash. He shares a cubicle with Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro). It’s the arrival of new employee Helly (Britt Lower) that sparks trouble when she rejects her life as an indentured office drone and begins asking questions of their almighty employer.

The cliffhanger ending of season one gives season two a running start: the innies succeed in breaking through to the real world and blowing the whistle on their inhumane work conditions; Mark’s innie learns that his outie’s wife is not only alive but is the company’s soft-spoken wellness director Ms Casey (Dichen Lachman); and Helly is horrified to discover her outie is Lumon scion Helena Eagan, daughter of CEO Jame Eagan, and that she entered the severed programme as a publicity stunt to demonstrate its alleged safety. It’s a lot to recall, and if the name Pete means nothing to you, I’d recommend a rewatch of series one. Severance is the rare show in danger of actually under-explaining!

Early reviews of season two have lamented its snail’s pace, but I find Severance to move briskly this time around, twists emerge faster than expected and are resolved even faster than that. We deal with the fallout of the previous finale within the first two hours and by episode three, the gang’s all back together with a new set of objectives: namely, rescue Mark’s wife, wherever she may be.

As someone who quickly tired of Lost’s meandering, I find that Severance walks the knife’s edge of infuriatingly withholding and totally engrossing. Season two, written by Dan Erickson and directed in large part by Ben Stiller, answers as many questions as it does raise new ones, sprinkling in sufficient titbits (what is Operation Cold Harbor?) to not only sustain interest but accrue it so that the few saggy episodes are forgiven – enjoyable if only for the sheer vibes. Visually, Severance is as stylish as ever: a surreal grayscale vision depicting the subterranean office of Lumon and, increasingly, beyond. One episode in particular is astonishing: unfolding in a lush forestry winterscape, it almost justifies the rumoured $20m budget per episode.

We do see more of the outside world here – a necessary development so as not to be wandering the same banal office corridors and themes ad nauseum. There is still loopily funny workplace satire (as a means of placating its employees, Lumon introduces “kindness reforms” including pineapple bobbing and a playroom of trick mirrors), but the show’s lens has shifted to focus on the innie-outie dynamic – most dramatically expressed in Helly, who keeps her outie’s shameful identity a secret from her co-workers. In one particularly affecting storyline, which introduces the criminally underrated Merritt Wever, we learn that Dylan’s outie is a loving but often disappointing family man who struggled to hold down a job before Lumon.

Severance remains a neat analogy for corporate life that manages to skirt the heavy-handedness you’d find in a lesser show. The same is true of its satire of cult-like company cultures made manifest in Lumon’s religious reverence for its founder: “We serve Kier!” Its light touch has much to do with the playfulness of its script; when outie Dylan interviews for a job at a door manufacturing company, he is asked inane questions like: “How old were you when you knew you loved doors?”

Bottling the bolt-from-the-blue brilliance for a second season is infinitely tougher, but Severance pulls it off with style, balancing its various tones as expertly and effortlessly as a waiter during a Friday night rush. Thankfully, it is still one of the best shows on TV – certainly, one worth rushing home from the office to watch.