Severance

Severance is one of the best shows on television right now, and it continues to prove that in its second season, which raises the bar in every single way.

I’m delighted to report that the second season, which debuted Friday, expands with confidence and integrity on what the first did best.

Season 2 is an exquisite, masterful work of television. Its 10 episodes pack sci-fi creepiness, wry social commentary and black humor inside of a tightly constructed story that’s substantive and thrilling.

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.

Whenever the truth comes out, and whatever it will be, it’s going to take a toll on both versions of Mark. It’s a heavy revelation Severance expects us to sit with, making for a crushing, exciting return.

It is mesmerising, gorgeous, heartbreaking and triumphant.

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.

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.

The vibe — and vibes are key to this show — continues to be as queasy and airless as the worst office experience. You feel submerged, as if you can almost smell the nylon and morning breath. .... Strap in. This drama is alive again.

The season takes new turns while remaining the most ambitious, batty and all-out pleasurable show on TV, an M.C. Escher maze whose plot convolutions never get in the way of its voice, heart and sense of humor.

Most impressively, Season 2 shows that “Severance” has figured out ways to grow while leaving enough of its core mysteries intact. It’s the rare series that feels both utterly spontaneous and fastidiously plotted out. It was worth the wait.

Apple TV+’s ingenious mind-blower of a series returns and it’s just as brilliant as in its first season.

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.

Severance soars to new heights with its long-anticipated Season 2, exceeding our expectations by digging deeper and hitting harder than before.

Severance Season 2 is exemplary.

Severance may have taken a while to boot up, but it knows what it’s doing. With perfect synergy, this series is a delight to circle back to and worth being kept in the loop with.

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.

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.

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.

The lauded Apple TV+ drama from creator Dan Erickson returns with a briskly paced sophomore season that refines its many themes into a timely, rewarding, and challenging debate about the power and parameters of personhood.

Some of Erickson, Friedman and Willimon’s most thoughtful calculations have gone into working out the split personalities’ affections. If that’s the kind of job a contentious writers room produces, they’ve got to figure out a way to make that industry policy.

Mesmerizing in its strangeness, the show only gets wilder and weirder in Season 2. [20 Jan - 9 Feb 2025, p.6]

The shorthand review on “Severance” should be “worth the wait”: As the highly anticipated dramatic series returns—after almost three years—it remains as provocative and unsettling a piece of psychological science-fiction as it ever was.

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.

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.

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.

Severance has still got it. There are some storytelling hiccups here and there (as there were, to be fair, in Season One), but for the most part the new season is as exciting, surprising, darkly funny, and distinct as before.

While this series continues to be coy about its central secrets, the first six episodes of Severance’s second season are as clever, aesthetically impressive, and attention-grabbing as the first.

Remains an expertly orchestrated brainteaser, its insights into its characters (and their expansive backstories) and circumstances at once illuminating and confounding, given that they always hint at grander secrets and conspiracies hidden just out of view.

By the end of the second season, a few aspects of the mystery plot come into better focus but it’s one step forward, two steps back. Still, “Severance” remains a rare, unique and completely distinctive series.

Due to its excellent combination of a character-driven narrative, absorbing mystery, and aesthetic beauty (cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné continues to deliver monumental vistas that take your breath away), "Severance" is still the full package, period.

While season two might not reach the same absurdist heights of its first season, it is nevertheless a confident return to the ‘Severance’ world.

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.

A series that remains fascinatingly enigmatic but that accords a mite more heart and humanity to its characters.

After a storming Season One, Season Two expands and deepens the original mysteries while opening up new ones. Sharply made and skilfully executed, the employee benefits are there if you stay with it.

This is remarkable, unique, mind-bending television, a show which makes you think long and hard, even when it’s in danger of disappearing down the rabbit-hole of its own inventive imagination.

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.

Darker, more ambitious, and as confounding as ever.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.