Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the opening title theme from Apple TV+’s Severance by Theodore Shapiro, a regular collaborator with frequent Severance episode director Ben Stiller, the show’s co-executive producer. (One of my favorite Shapiro scores is from the Stiller/Owen Wilson version of Starsky & Hutch.)
Aaron J. Waltke is the writer of several of Star Trek: Prodigy’s best episodes (including “All the World’s a Stage,” a funny Prime Directive violation story that starts out like Galaxy Quest and later takes a bittersweet turn) and “Holograms All the Way Down,” the funniest (and shortest) installment of the much-maligned Star Trek: very Short Treks. Yesterday on Bluesky, Waltke wrote that Shapiro’s Severance opening title theme reminded him of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three composer David Shire’s anxiety-ridden piano theme from The Conversation, one of the best thrillers the late Gene Hackman starred in, and his post caught Shapiro’s attention. Shapiro confirmed that yes, the Conversation theme was an influence on his theme for Severance.
Even though I don’t subscribe to Apple TV+, I was able to watch Severance’s first season in January. The Roku Channel temporarily posted the entire first season to promote the premiere of the long-delayed second season, and I burned through the nine-episode season in three days. It was that captivating.
Creator/showrunner Dan Erickson came up with one of the most delightfully twisted shows that say, “America worships billionaires way too much.” The way Patricia Arquette’s Ms. Cobel and other employees of Lumon Industries, a biotech company, worship Kier Eagan, Lumon’s deceased founder, is unsettling because I see their behavior everywhere. Examples include the cult that is the Church of Scientology, the MAGAt death cult (the only good Nazi is a dead one), and Disney Adults who are fans of a corporation. Anybody who’s a fan of a corporation isn’t right in the head, and Severance—not to be confused with Ling Ma’s 2018 post-apocalyptic novel of the same name—is a satire about how that type of fandom can go out of control.
The show is also a satire about the desire to separate our work selves from our actual selves, and in Severance’s universe, Lumon invented the “severance” medical procedure. It allows employees to separate their work memories from their personal lives so that they become two different people in the same body: an “innie” whose sole purpose is to concentrate on their hard-to-describe work within Lumon’s “severed floor” and an “outie” who doesn’t take any of that work home with them. If you ever had a job you hated, you probably wish that you had a severance chip in your head when you did that shit job.
But the severance chip creates more damage than good. A former Lumon employee who was severed changed his mind about agreeing to the severance procedure and had it reversed, but the “reintegration” resulted in permanent brain damage. The rebellious Helly R., Lumon’s newest employee in the first season, is immediately repulsed by Lumon’s bizarre office culture and is upset to find out that her outie is a sinister woman who thinks of her as not a person. Dylan G., Irving B., and Mark S., her co-workers in the “Macrodata Refinement Department,” find out important details about their outies that were kept hidden from them and freak the fuck out as well.
Anti-Lumon protesters in the town of Kier, where Lumon is headquartered, are comparing Lumon’s treatment of innies to slavery. They’re fighting for an end to the severance procedure.
There’s no prompt today. I can’t think of any regarding Severance, which has become a popular subject among academics because of its material about the work-life balance and its anti-capitalist tone. (I would like to see someone do a textual or video essay on how Severance has been able to get away with its critique of capitalism, while another Apple TV+ show, The Problem with Jon Stewart, wasn’t able to do the same. The Problem was taken out back and shot like Old Yeller, and Stewart went back to The Daily Show.) The above “Music Dance Experience” scene from the “Defiant Jazz” episode, one of six episodes Stiller directed in Severance’s first season, is my favorite scene of the season. There’s so much juicy shit going on in this one four-minute scene, and there’s so much great acting by everybody. I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes the subject of a video essay someday.
I never heard saxman Joe McPhee’s 1970 recording of “Shakey Jake” before Helly picked it out of the reward options Mr. Milchick, Ms. Cobel’s right-hand man, presented to her. (The 13-minute “Shakey Jake” is a motherfucking bop. Google searches for McPhee, who’s still alive, must have shot up right after “Defiant Jazz” was released.) The absurdity of a small dance party as a reward for hours and hours of grueling and meaningless work is a good example of the show’s frequent indictment of the way corporations infantilize their employees.
The different effects of the severance chip on the “refiners” are on display in their dance moves. Irv and Mark have zero rhythm. They dance exactly like how Eddie Murphy and a hundred other Black comics have described or recreated Caucasian choreography in their stand-up, which is a bit funny because Irv and Mark’s outies are much hipper than this. (But then Mark discovers in his pocket the all-access key card his outie stole from Lumon security chief Doug Graner right after ex-Lumon surgeon Asal Reghabi murdered Mr. Graner, and his body language completely changes.) Meanwhile, Helly is much more playful and empathetic than her outie, and her dance moves reflect that.
Mr. Milchick outdances everybody—check out Tramell Tillman’s shimmy as “Shakey Jake” begins—and I like how Tillman expresses Mr. Milchick’s power over the refiners in the way Mr. Milchick gets into everybody’s personal space. Dylan, angry over having just found out that his outie has a son while Mr. Milchick threatened him in the last episode, loses his shit when Mr. Milchick gets in his personal space.
Zach Cherry, who plays Dylan, is primarily known for being a funny guy, thanks to most of his prior scenes on Severance, as well as his scenes as an innocent bystander named Klev in MCU movies and his guest spots on a lot of shows that are popular among comedy nerds. Tillman was, prior to the “Music Dance Experience” scene, often imposing as Mr. Milchick. In that scene, Cherry and Tillman switch places so that Cherry is now the tough and serious Black guy and Tillman becomes the funny Black guy, thanks to a very un-Milchick-like Scooby-Doo chase scene scream when Dylan bites Mr. Milchick in the arm.
The “Music Dance Experience” scene is the one scene from Severance’s first season I’ve rewatched more than any other scene because of the fun ways it intermingles the thriller side of Severance with the comedic side, while I haven’t watched Severance’s second season, which concludes tomorrow on Apple TV+. All I know about the season is that Shapiro’s haunting opening title theme is unchanged, while the eerie imagery German digital artist Oliver Latta, a.k.a. Extraweg, came up with for the first-season opening title sequence, which featured only a 3D animation of series lead Adam Scott, has been completely updated by Latta to reflect second-season storylines and include the likenesses of Arquette, John Turturro, Dichen Lachman, and Britt Lower.
The final image in the second-season opening titles is creepy, and so are the Lumon Branch 501 building’s similarities to the Village from The Prisoner.
But the Village never threw anything that looked as creepy as the waffle party orgy that was the talk of April 1, 2022.
Severance captures the eerie and anti-authoritarian spirit of The Prisoner better than AMC’s 2009 remake of The Prisoner did.
“[The dynamic between the Lumon brass and the employees], plus the overall weirdness of Lumon’s severed floor, recalls the 1967 British TV spy series The Prisoner,” wrote A.V. Club contributor Stephen Robinson in “Severance Is the Prisoner Remake I Always Wanted,” a piece from his newsletter, which I stumbled into after I wondered if I’m not the only one who experienced flashbacks to the Village while watching Severance.
The Prisoner is one of my favorite shows from the ’60s, and, like Defector contributor Corey Atad said over on Bluesky:
Be seeing you.