{"id":5056,"date":"2025-06-24T21:26:47","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T02:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/?p=5056"},"modified":"2025-06-24T21:26:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T02:26:47","slug":"review-severance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/review-severance\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Severance"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, I just finished watching the first two seasons of Severance<\/em> and it was not what I thought it would be. The basic premise is that the characters work for a company that splits their work self and their outside self into two completely separate personalities. Based on that and some of the comments I’ve seen about the show, I was expecting a satire of capitalism, or at least corporate culture. It was not that.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to say that it doesn’t satirize corporate culture, but the humor in that bucket is much more in the spirit of Dilbert<\/em> than Office Space.<\/em> In other words, it’s precisely the kind of takedown of corporate culture you’d expect from a company with suicide nets around their factories. There are moments–mostly based things like the awkwardness of “mandatory fun” or the fact that companies routinely give out “perks” that are the same kind of shit little kids trade Skee-ball tickets for at Chuck E. Cheese–when the show approaches actual criticism, but even those scenes invariably comes across as watered-down. Even the “evil corporation” stuff is cartoonishly cultish and EVIL, not the kind of banal cultishness and evil found in actual companies. If you’re hoping for hoping for Philip K. Dick type stuff, this ain’t it.<\/p>\n

The whole “two people in one body” premise seems like it should still lead to a good plot about unravelling the mystery, but even there it doesn’t always work. While the premise mostly contributes to the overall story, there are moments when it definitely feels like the fact the two personalities don’t share information kind of feels like cheating. Still, the mystery is well-written and held my interest. The broad strokes aren’t terribly original, but it’s compelling and mostly holds together.<\/p>\n

What really makes the show worth watching is that it’s packed with actors who can make any character interesting, and the plotlines that fall more into standard “workplace drama” territory are done well. Maybe I expect less from those kind of storylines, but sometimes it felt like the show would be nearly as interesting if they scrapped the sci-fi angle entirely and wrote a straight office drama. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have watched that show, so I guess the sci-fi element at least pulled me in even if it didn’t really impress me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, I just finished watching the first two seasons of Severance and it was not what I thought it would be. The basic premise is that the characters work for a company that splits their work self and their outside self into two completely separate personalities. Based on that and some of the comments I’ve…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5058,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[1448,3285,3814,3815,3816],"class_list":["post-5056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-science-fiction","tag-office-space","tag-severance","tag-dilbert","tag-phlip-k-dick"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5059,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions\/5059"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}