Severance season two is strange, stylish and totally engrossing
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Adam Scott and co are back after a three-year hiatus in this sharp, funny comment on office life. In the first episode of Severance season two, a shrunken office corridor opens out into a stark white, windowless room. Inside are grassy knolls, dotted with sheep grazing under the unforgiving glare of fluorescent lights. It’s the sort of deeply strange scene viewers have come to expect from the Apple TV+ sci-fi series, which was hailed as a sharp and funny comment on office life when it was released back in 2022 – before disappearing for three years.
![[Adam Scott in ‘Severance’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/16/12/newFile-1.jpg)
Finally, following Hollywood strikes, rewrites, and reshoots, Severance is back. As we now know, the severance of the title refers not to a financial payout but to a medical procedure that sees willing employees of a shadowy biotech firm, Lumon, isolate their work selves (innies) from their outer selves (outies). In effect, innies exist purely within the workplace; outies, purely outside of it. Suffice to say, the innies are getting a raw deal.
Severance easily could’ve buckled under the weight of its conceit, but has been held together by the very human connections at its heart – embodied by a superb ensemble cast led by the sweetly acquiescent Adam Scott as Mark S, an employee who opts into severance in order to forget, at least for eight hours a day, the grief of losing his wife in a car crash. He shares a cubicle with Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro). It’s the arrival of new employee Helly (Britt Lower) that sparks trouble when she rejects her life as an indentured office drone and begins asking questions of their almighty employer.
