Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Building The Company of Tomorrow Today, or Building The Company of Today Yesterday

2025-Jan-25

Today on the blog we will be talking about a workplace drama. There have been occasions of workplace drama that I have personally experienced. Sometimes juicy stuff that affects millions of people throughout the industry. The bigram ‘workplace drama’ takes a new meaning when I say this blog post will be discussing a television show within the ‘workplace drama’ genre.

Not a workplace comedy. In retrospect, I have found that I have watched plenty of those. Mostly before I ever had a job.

The show being discussed today will be the second drama reviewed over here on the blog. Every other TV series discussed here has been a comedy of the sitcom or animated variety, cut up into thirty minute episodes. Twenty-two ish minutes after removing commercials. The only other dramatic series that Fredlambuth.com has set its critical gaze upon prior to today was the landmark adaptation of Shogun last spring.

There are only a handful of ‘dramatic’ series that I watch on repeat, as evidenced by the drama/comedy ratio on the blog here. Comedies are the kind of show I can watch on repeat to the point of neurosis. Especially when it comes to sitcoms. Something about sitcom writing can effectively land without having your attention fully engaged into the plotting between the jokes. A somewhat passive appreciation. Much like a landscape painting in a sitting room. Enjoyable without needing to put all available attention into it, even though it is there if you want to put your full attention on it.

Those handful of dramatic shows I can think of that I find watching more than once are Deadwood, The Wire, and Mad Men; in order of me watching the last episode of each series. They’re all equally as delightful on repeat to me. I supposed Deadwood is a little sweeter because of the brevity of the episode count. That show certainly made up for its short length in the breadth of production value. That thoroughfare running through the Deadwood camp was some top-notch onscreen magic.

The lyricism of each series' writing was something I could enjoy while my eyes were busy with artistic production. Each of those series were ones I watched by downloading to the very desktop or laptop I would use for finishing my pencil/ink artist output with digital colors. This would be the mid to late 2000s. The stone age of my artistic experience of using color.

Each series was watched in piecemeal downloads of each episode I found in torrents. They were dramatic series I would seek out, not something to watch because I had easy access to a TV. When I grew up, for reasons I still cannot explicitly name, I was turned off by a one hour dramatic series. The distinction of a dramatic series requiring one hour rather than thirty minutes is an arbitrary line I still do not understand, nor appreciate. Whatever the reason beyond that, there is not any dramatic series that springs to mind as something I’d want to watch again on an available streaming service. Maybe a few monster-of-the-week episodes of the early seasons of The X-Files.

After all that commiserating about why dramatic TV shows rarely do it for me, let alone in a lasting way, let us talk about the recent AppleTV production Severance! An exception to the rule. A show I had heard wonderful accolades about from the right critics and people in my life, for years. I never got around to watching it. The show was only available from yet another streaming service: AppleTV.

I was not lacking for great television that I had yet to watch despite accolades and personal recommendations, so Severance was relegated to the ‘color me intrigued’ section of my interest. Until it was free and/or easy to me, it was going to remain there like so many movies and TV series I heard are amazing but I just don’t have the energy to start, let alone want to spend money to discover. Severance remained in this hopeful purgatory until recently when I found it advertised as free, by way of the menu on the Roku device I use on one of the TVs. Well, free with ads.

This review was made after the first episode of the second season was released. The gap between the previous season for me was just a week or so. In production time it was three years. One of the few times being a patient fan can be convenient.

I have found the series to have lived up to the hype. That is pretty rare in my experience. Personally holding hype for some type of artistic production and finding the results to meet or exceed expectations is something that happens every few years in each medium for me.

I found Severance to be beguiling, placidly beautiful, and most importantly: intellectually curious. This show jumped into the places I look for in my science fiction reading as well as in my philosophy reading. The premise of this show opens up so many thought exercises about what life or consciousness is worth living. It made me merit new considerations of death. Possible intellectual murders of theoretical microcosmic versions of my own self. Boy that sounds like 400 level philosophy class hogwash.

The show does a good job of feeding answers at the same pace as asking questions. So far. Maybe a little heavy on the unanswered questions and mystery. That is a dispensation I am more than willing to give this show, considering the quality I have perceived from most every other aspect of this show’s production. Before, I had been burned by television shows that make very tall orders of mysterious backstory that either get ignored, addressed cheaply, or most often: answered with even more questions.

Mystery is wonderful in a television show. Too much and I usually trail off in interest. Mystery can become tawdry if there are not enough, or any, foundational answers to anchor new mysterious topics. Here and there some answers need to be given to the audience. Another two cents worth of writer’s advice is to not give too many answers. Or to only show it. Don’t tell them.

Severance is in a visual medium and plays into the story absurdly well as a storytelling agent. It shows a lot and I am probably not catching all the production is delivering. Some of the hype that lured me in discussed how many messages are laden into the visual production. The show could be presented in a foreign language or muted with almost the same impression given on the audience. The actors do a fine job. As good as their performances, they are toys to the real star of the show, the workplace.

The liminal office space that the ‘innie’ storyline within the show takes place in is a sublimely conjured idea of office hell. So clean. So upbeat in mood, but not too upbeat. That could get dangerous. The set design screams office placidity. The show looks like a version of my personal hell. The plot does a more thorough job of fleshing out why this idea of hell is more than a sterile visual likeness of it, but an actual novel idea of hell. A Sisyphean hell with the most bare rewards. A hell that teases you with a more rewarding life going on around you.

Wonderful as this one season, plus one subsequent episode is, I still have misgivings about the show needing to be defrayed before I can put my mind at ease. The show can get pretty damn weird. If the weirdness only goes up in scale, my opinion of what I have already seen will likely turn for the worse. At this point I can only endorse it so much. So far, this show’s first impression is intoxicating.

Something else those three dramatic shows I mentioned before have in common is that they did not disappoint from one season to the next. Each of them relied less on ‘mystery’ or bizarreness as Severance does, but they did write some big storytelling checks that did end up getting cashed later on. That is why this review could later be seen as fawning. A victim of the show’s hype. From what I can tell by clickbait ads or mentions in infotainment writing the few months before this second season release, this show is getting pushed. Maybe by Apple or by genuine interest. The meta-story of its actual production adds something to the show's intrigue.

Tons of money is thrown into this show, as seen by the casting. The show stars Adam Scott, who had played either brash douchebag types or vulnerable nice guys without too much in between roles that I had seen before. His character’s ‘real life’ in Severance is a bit sadder than his first few episodes of Party Down, where he came off as existentially drained. In this case he plays the sadness more personally. The money I’m talking about that is being thrown on screen is in the supporting roles. Some Hollywood A-listers get a chance to throw their acting weight into some oddball characters.

The actors I cannot identify by name do a serviceable job. They’re handed slightly more demure roles than the more famous names in the cast. I’m no acting expert. I’m satisfied with any acting performance with exception of the most obviously wooden deliveries.

Will this show break through to become the fourth dramatic series I find myself watching over and over again? Time will tell. I have the suspicion that the writers will at least reward a second viewing for audience members that are hunting down clues to later seasons reveals. The very presence of these ‘clues’ gives me hope that there will be some glorious late season plot to harvest.