Apple TV’s Severance is an unnerving sci-fi about how your job doesn’t want you to be human

polygon.com:

Depending on your vantage point, the current state of employment — with more unions forming, or reconsiderations of the true cost of a job— is a Great Resignation or a Great Reevaluation. Regardless, between a pandemic exposing how incidental workers are made to feel in the face of their jobs, and the larger capitalistic logic that got us all here, this moment in time is not a good time. It’s a divide that no show understands quite to the degree of Severance, Apple TV Plus’ new sci-fi series in which people forcibly divide their work selves from their personal selves. The show goes to some bleak places, but with each twist — of the show, or its philosophical knife — it’s also increasingly compelling.

The world-building foundation results in an Escher-like world in which being of two minds is more of a threat than ever: The first episode (aptly titled “Good News About Hell”) opens with a woman coming to in a windowless conference room for the mysterious Lumon company, unsure of where or even who she is. She is as bewildered as she is upset, and Ben Stiller — who directed the first two episodes, and a handful throughout the series — lets the show linger in the mundane terror of waking up to a work-life division. This is, after all, the first time she’s ever really woken up, at least with this consciousness.

And it can be an attractive division in the world of Severance. Mark (Adam Scott) took the job offer to get away from his grief about losing his wife; for eight hours a day he gets to be a totally new person, unencumbered by the aching gnaw of missing someone close, freed from weeping openly in his parked car. That those hours happen to be ones he gets paid for is a perk.

But Severance is ultimately a thriller, and a