|
CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
77
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
|
Critic Reviews
Oct 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
In that time between the first and second seasons, "Severance" lost none of its mind-bending electricity. .... “Severance” amplifies its intrigue without falling into the second-season trap of making key enigmas inscrutable or boring, a trap too many puzzle-box shows tumble into when challenged to top their triumphant first seasons.
Read full review
Jan 17, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Mark’s dilemma frames a superlative new season that probes the nature of selfhood, death, and most of all love. .... What makes this one excellent is the resonance—the simultaneous relevance and timelessness—of its themes. After white-knuckling my way through a second season finale that, in my estimation, surpasses even the first, I couldn’t be more eager to hear what else Severance has to say.
Read full review
iJan 17, 2025
Season 2 Review:
In the first season, momentum built slowly until the final three episodes took off like a rocket. Again, this season takes its time until – whoosh! Does this finale top the first one? Not quite. But it does top just about everything else on TV. I can’t stop thinking about it.
Read full review
The IndependentJan 17, 2025
Season 2 Review:
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.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
As long as “Severance” can deliver these bits of sublime strangeness, it’s easy to suspend one’s disbelief, as well as one’s thirst for concrete information. Whatever the destination “Severance” is aiming for, the journey dramatizes the arbitrary rules and compartmentalized nature of modern work better than anything else on air.
Read full review
ColliderJan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
This evolving, mind-bending continuation, as crafted by Erickson and fellow writers Mohamad El Masri, Wei-Ning Yu, Anna Ouyand Moench, Erin Wagoner, Mark Friedman, and Adam Countee, cements Severance as an absolute triumph of television, proving beyond a shadow of any doubt that the best stories are always worth waiting for.
Read full review
The GuardianFeb 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Severance looks beautiful and is directed with enormous sensitivity and style by Stiller. His quartet of oddball actors, Arquette (a frequent Stiller collaborator), Turturro, Walken and Tillman, elevate an already shining script and a story that is always a finely calibrated 12 to 15 degrees off kilter, while the everyman quality of Scott throws the whole into perfect relief.
Read full review
ColliderFeb 7, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Those frequent glimpses we get into Lumon's darker and more sinister edges are what make the series a compelling watch, but rather than sink too deeply into irreversible darkness, Severance also focuses on highlighting the truth that human connection can be found even for those who have made the intentional choice to divide themselves. ... But one facet that contributes to its overall success is the direction, with episodes of the series helmed by both Ben Stiller and Aoife Mcardle to extraordinary effect.
Read full review
IndieWireJan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
The series never feels overstuffed, bogged down, or in too deep. Instead, it’s as if Erickson, Stiller, and Co. see the opportunity in front of them — in the show’s relatable premise, its talented cast and crew, as well as its zeitgeist-clinching popularity — and stand determined to get the best out of their run with it; to put in the work; to value each step in the same way they hope audiences can. The result is time well spent — for them, and for us.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Season 1 of Severance felt propelled primarily by the mysteries at its core, especially when it came to who these people were, outside of the office. Season 2 manages to provide enough answers to keep at least this critic from throwing anything at the screen, while digging even deeper into the implications of this concept.
Read full review
The PlaylistFeb 17, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It’s a magnetic universe Erickson, Stiller (who directs six of the nine episodes of Season 1), and “Brave New World” director Aoife McArdle craft, one that pulls in the icy, mysterious pacing of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman. It’s got twisty sci-fi worldbuilding that reminds you of a more procedural read on “Inception” and “The Matrix,” too, with maybe a spike of “The Truman Show” for good measure.
Read full review
Feb 7, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Severance’s entire cast is a symphony without a single off-note. Scott stands out as the series’ emotional anchor, and Tillman delivers a breakout performance as the office warden Milchick. ... Severance’s deadpan humor is more like Being John Malkovich than Zoolander and Tropic Thunder. Stiller deftly balances absurd comic moments with genuine character development.
Read full review
Sep 4, 2025TV Guide MagazineJan 28, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Mesmerizing in its strangeness, the show only gets wilder and weirder in Season 2. [20 Jan - 9 Feb 2025, p.6]
Jan 15, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Very few series operate on this many levels. Severance fuses together existential thriller, dystopian science fiction, corporate critique, romantic drama, buddy comedy and visual poem, with dollops of body horror mixed in for good measure. .... Not every plot path works, and it feels like every time one mystery is solved (or solved-ish), the writers drop another in its place. But the Severance team has come back to work with an engrossing, thoughtful season about exploitative billionaires, corporate trickery and the desire to escape real world misery. I can’t think of a more appropriate way to start off 2025.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
There’s a clear idea of what the show wants to be about, of the specific tensions and unreconcilable conflicts it wants to present for our consideration. And if all the threads don’t entirely come together, and some of the revelations are more muddled indication than meaningful twist, it’s still Severance.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
It all adds up to dizzying, exciting television, building to a finale that matches the thrilling highs of the end of Season 1. While some viewers were frustrated by Severance's refusal to wrap its story up neatly at the end of the first season, it does in fact harken back to that era of TV many of us yearn for: the age of patient mystery box TV.
Read full review
The Daily BeastJan 7, 2025
Feb 17, 2022
Feb 17, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Playful and mordantly funny, “Severance” is like a Charlie Kaufman-designed nightmare, from the midcentury-menacing set to the way it sketches the innies’ hermetic lives. ... The nine-episode season suffers from streaming slump in the middle, but it hooks you early and accelerates late.
Read full review
LooperJan 16, 2025
Feb 17, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Blessed with a sharp cast that includes John Turturro and Christopher Walken as senior innies, “Severance,” which is produced and mostly directed by Ben Stiller, manages to adeptly juggle the grim and the giggly (melon ball party, anyone?). More importantly, it never fails to entertain. In the end it leaves you begging for more. Always a good sign.
Read full review
The Observer (UK)Jan 21, 2025
Season 2 Review:
So far, so intriguing and wonderfully surrealist and bonkers, but, but… the new series suffers from losing the novelty factor (we’ve seen Lumon’s dazzling white corridors before). It also continues to be gratingly slow. I’m sure we’re all in for more sage, acid commentary on the clash between corporate blankness and the human condition, if we can just hang on for it.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Severance is better than perhaps any other show on television at capturing the indignities of modern work, using sci-fi exaggerations to cast our own dystopian reality into stark relief. As the Dan Erickson-created series enters its sophomore season, that sharpness as well as an insistence on the humanity of characters condemned to an environment hostile to it continue to be its twin north stars, guiding it over minor stumbles in momentum and mystery-box puzzling along the way.
Read full review
May 25, 2022
Feb 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Before long, these employees satisfyingly rise up to break free of those arbitrary cubbies, after seeing not merely the system’s exploitation but undeniable evil. By then, viewers will have long been hooked by not only that vital social commentary and the series spiky humor, but also Severance’s office shredder sharp direction and — above all — its white-collar hero cast.
Read full review
Feb 7, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The whole thing builds in very satisfying ways, up through a season finale that is so tense, I may have forgotten to breathe a few times. That concluding hour is far more pleasurable than anything the innies get to experience as they complete tasks they don’t fully understand, in service of a world and lives they’re never allowed to visit.
Read full review
Feb 17, 2022
Jan 17, 2025
Season 2 Review:
When the show leans into its characters and finds ways to push them into its singular situations, then it grabs you with force. Yet even with convoluted stories, I feel compelled to watch "Severance" to its end. You probably will too. Its cast is that good, and the writing is, most of the time, that gripping.
Read full review
Feb 8, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The idea of giant tech conglomerates consuming our lives, whether or not we work under their employ, is admittedly dour stuff. But thanks to its smart, sophisticated direction and sharp performances, Severence is never didactic, and mercifully doesn’t feel like work.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
It’s still a well-made, interesting show, far-reaching in its aims and with an impressive cast of well-known actors like Scott and Arquette and less-familiar faces like Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, and Zach Cherry as Mark’s co-workers. Casting may be the show’s most valuable asset. You’re willing to travel down some of those zigs and zags because you’re in such good company while you do it, but their performances can only distract so long from the laggier elements of the season.
Read full review
Jan 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
I’m sure plenty of viewers will say: I liked Season 1, so repeat away! Fair enough. But that’s not a story extending out because it has places to go. Atmosphere — of which “Severance” has plenty — will only take you so far. A show can not hinge on vibes alone, though “Severance” is giving it a try.
Read full review
Jan 15, 2025
Season 2 Review:
We want to know what happens to Helly and Mark — all four of them. We care about the others along with their "outie" doubles. And goats aside, the abiding mystery still hints at something consequential. Perhaps "Severance" will get around to a genuinely profound insight into our own fraught life and times. Perhaps. If only this second season weren't so self-serious about the whole process.
Read full review
Feb 16, 2022
Season 1 Review:
While director Ben Stiller does a fine job of placing us inside the expansive yet claustrophobic grounds of Lumon, and the cast is universally excellent, “Severance” starts with a slow crawl and builds to a steady walk — but never really takes flight and spends far too much time leading us to a reveal we knew was coming five episodes earlier.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Where there are plenty of sweet moments and a continuation of the surreal commentary on faceless megacorporations, meaningless jobs, and out-of-whack work-life balance, showrunner Dan Erickson is overly focused on long shots of Severance’s bleak world or clumsily building up its villains.
Read full review
RogerEbert.comJan 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
It feels churlish to criticize one for trying to do as much as this season of “Severance” is attempting, but it’s a balance and the scales are out of whack enough that I too often questioned why I should care – a feeling I never had in season one. It’s also a show that’s a bit too in love with its pregnant pauses, calling awareness to its “heavy ideas” instead of weaving them into the fabric of the show.
Read full review
Feb 17, 2022
Season 1 Review:
What exactly are we watching? As a critique of office life, it’s empty, and somewhat patronizing. ... There is certainly a strain of comedy being worked here, along with some seemingly random, one might say Buñuelian weirdnesses, but it is not often funny; at times, it feels meant as satire, but of what? ... The season finale is genuinely exciting and suspenseful, but, really, even as an advocate of slow television, we might have got there in half the time with twice the effect.
Read full review
Current TV Shows
By MetascoreBy User Score