Severance on Apple TV is an example of how you can come up with a good idea for a TV show from a creative misinterpretation of a technical term. A severance package in corporate life is what you get paid when you leave a job, but in this sci-fi (semi)comedy written by Dan Erickson and overseen by Ben Stiller (Tropic Thunder), it means that the Lumon Corporation operates on your brain so that you can’t remember what you do at work when you are at home and who you are at home when you are at work. Your memories are severed.
On the plus side, this is a pretty awesome idea for the COVID era. Is the Lumon Corp. trying to get more work out of you? Or are they just testing your loyalty with their nonsensical demands?
After all, they don’t seem to get their severed employees to do much work and instead waste most of their time trying to maintain their totalitarian system. Or are they just trying to see how much they can screw with their long-suffering employees/ guinea pigs before they rebel? (This question is not answered by the end of the first season.)
Has Ben Stiller actually ever worked in a corporate office? Or has he mostly just shot the breeze with employees when visiting his tax accountant? Having listened to his parents’ very funny Blue Nun wine commercials in the 1970s, I would have offered him a bungalow on the studio lot when he was a 20-something. Nature and nurture.
This being a Ben Stiller production... Stiller isn’t exactly a genius as either an actor or writer, but he is impressive as an entrepreneur. I can recall going to see a Paul Thomas Anderson movie based on a Thomas Pynchon novel at the high-end Arclight, but it was sold out so I was in a crabby mood. But my wife convinced me to go see Night at the Museum 3 at the Pacific Sherman Oaks 5, with its terrible sound system. And yet Stiller’s sequel totally cheered me up.
Thus, if Ben offers you a role, you should probably go along with it. The cast, not surprisingly, is sterling. Adam Scott from Parks & Rec is the dweeby central character who looks like Tom Cruise if Tom didn’t know a good plastic surgeon. Patricia Arquette is a terrifying executive reminiscent of if Hillary had won in 2016. The great John Turturro plays a cringingly loyal gay elderly employee who has a crush on the great Christopher Walken playing an even more elderly gay employee whose speaking cadence is a work of genius.
On the other hand, it’s hard not to imagine that after several seasons, the final episode will be, in the tradition of Lost, a huge disappointment.
We shall see.
