“Hey, you watching Severance?” he asked. Then I went back about my day. And he went back about his.
But that question, it gnawed. Wasn’t that the new Adam Scott show? You liked Adam Scott. He was on Parks and Rec after all.
You should watch Severance.
Okay, I’ll see you next week.
Not enough. Okay. Let’s do this.
I am unbelievably glad that I didn’t come across Severance while I was writing Lunch Eater. The way it aligns with what I was trying to do means it would undoubtedly have infected what I was trying to achieve with the book.
Around the mid point of episode 7, I was pretty close to proclaiming that it was the best TV show that has happened in the past 5 years (why 5 years? well, whenever thinking about best shows on TV I have to account for The Leftovers and The Americans, so 5 years gets us clear of those. And its going to be a long time, if ever, before something comes along that dethrones one or both of those).
But then the end of episode 7 happens and there’s the push to the end of the season.
Let’s go back.
This is a great show. Severance has a great high concept. What if you were able to ‘sever’ your workself and your non-workself. So one wasn’t aware of what the other did. You’d get up, get ready for work, walk in the office, next thing you know it’s the end of the day and you’re heading home. You wouldn’t have to worry about whatever happened at work infecting your life outside work hours.
And through that, the show tells something that is almost straight horror. It never shies away from exploring every nook and cranny of its concept. Being an office drone is a strange kind of existential horror and the show dials in on that pretty perfectly.
Sure, it’s marketed as a dark comedy but, honestly, in the first 4 episodes, there ain’t much comedy at play. I like dark comedy and will often laugh at things others do not. This is not that show.
At least, for the first 4 episodes. Then comes episode 5 when it needs to release tension a little, and it does it in a true absurdist fashion. It’s still great.
But at that point, you start to become aware that it has seeded some mystery box elements in amongst everything. Which is fine. This sort of show can’t really get on TV these days without that sort of thing.
Which is where the problem creeps in. Come the end of episode 7, the show dials in on the mystery box, thriller of it all. And it’s still a great show and it’s propulsive, and it will drag you back for more and when you hit the end of the season and you hit that cliffhanger (and shows still do cliffhangers these days? I thought we stopped that) and you want season 2 to drop now. But it loses something.
That horror is gone at expense of resolving those mysteries they’ve set up. Which makes for exciting but ultimately hollow TV.
And I bring all of this up because those first 4 episodes are essentially what I wanted to do with Lunch Eater but didn’t achieve. Severance plays more in the realm of existential horror, while the book wants to be cosmic horror.
I am in some kind of awe of how close the shows hews to what I was trying to do while I had no idea the show was even a thing that I would come across. And when the show is firing and not getting twisted in its lore, it is possibly the grand statement on the modern workplace that the world currently needs.
How the dissolution of the loyalty of the worker to a company has essentially resulted in companies torturing their workers for reasons the workers cannot comprehend.
But of course, it can’t be the great TV show of the past 5 years because Russian Doll exists and why are you reading this and now watching season 2 of that?
So is there anything that I can learn from Severance and apply to Lunch Eater? I suspect not. There is a tightness to the narrative, especially early on, that is appealing. And for sure the book could learn a lesson about realising characters. The characters on the show are all archetypes but imbued with enough inner life that I can see how the show could provide a good blueprint for punching up characters like Derrick and Claire (and possibly bringing Ben back on page).
But ultimately, what the show trucks in is the modern corporate workplace of the US. Which brings with it issues that often aren’t at play in other parts of the Western world. Sure, most workplaces have that ‘why are we doing the things we do?’ vibe to them. But the modern US workplace has the compounding factor of unions not really being a thing and attempts by workers to unionise being actively rejected if not punished by the company.
And that doesn’t really have much to do with the public service. I mean, the whole point of the public service is you’ve got tons of benefits and will never be fired because you get treated like trash are in service to the public.
The public service creates workplaces that are quite unlike other workplaces out in the real world private sector. This is by design. So that brings with it a whole host of different horrors.
Which seems like a lot of words to sort of review Severance and sort of talk about how it applies to Lunch Eater. But there is a wider point here.
Often writers seem scared to consume works that might line up with what they are doing. But that’s wrong. You need to stare hard at this works so you can see what works and what doesn’t. What has been highlighted. What has been missed. And sure, I am glad I didn’t see this show while writing the book because if I did then what’s the bet I would ave thrown the book in the bin and started writing something else about a pizza delivery driver that lives life by a samurai code and is in an eternal battle with the local Domino’s.
But there is so much to learn from having watched this show. Even if it doesn’t explicitly make it on the page.