Oh how I love SciFi without action scenes! Sevarance is a story based on a great premise: an all powerful company is able to sever a person into two. One gets to live outside the company clock; the other only in the office. Both share the same body, but are completely different and have their memories separated.
Apple tried to position itself in a small niche of the wider streaming service pool. When Netflix and others produce one mediocre show after another, Apple is much slower and (seems to) focus on quality. It allows itself riskier productions.
Severance plays very much like an independent movie. It’s minimal in presentation, I would even call it cold as everything serves a goal. Most of the show happens either in a soulless office building, or in a few semi-empty locations. Somehow, for the first few episodes I had strong reminiscence of Shane Carruth’s works. Those have close to nothing in common with Severance, but the feeling was there. And I love Curroths’s works!
The plot develops slowly and in an interesting way, everything points towards a great SciFi. I was heavily invested in the plot, wanting to know what was hidden underneath.
Unfortunately, it’s a typical modern TV series. Its runtime is expanded thin, we’ve got romance and unnecessary threads. Remember when they made three huge movies out of Hobbit? Yeah, it’s the same here. What would have been an amazing movie is a good TV show.
It’s stretched almost into a self-parody. They tried to have a mass appeal and with it, they lessen the story significantly. I think they had material for 2 hours movie, maybe a miniseries. But for multiple seasons? I sure hope to be wrong, but it seems that it will the same as it was with Westworld. Great start, but it’s all downhill from here.
The biggest offender here is the last episode which serves only the second season. Such high-addrenaline scene had no place in this story. But hey, let’s make people remember about that season 2 that we will make someday.
For me Severance is a perfect example of current TV drama state. You can clearly see that it was made with passion, it could have been great. But screw that, let’s have it for four years. Fill her up, please.
It’s very good as a TV show nevertheless.