Spoilers will try to avoid the long words.

Takes a lot nowadays to get me into the second season of a show. The dynamic is known, the characters are familiar and the storyline probably ended in some sort of a cliffhanger. However, the novelty has worn off, the tension needs to dissipate and we don’t want to rethread the same storyline over itself. There has to be a plan. And Kier preserve us, seems there is. Although I will try to keep this low on the spoiler spectrum, if you haven’t seen the first season you should start here.

(Credit: Apple TV+)

Severance (2022) is created by Dan Erickson. With the series in hiatus for three years, the challenge is to bring back the dynamic without doing the same thing all over again. The show wisely opts to break the dynamic first, bringing us Mark S (Adam Scott) with a new team. The destinies of Helly R (Britt Lower), Dylan G (Zach Cherry) and Irving B (John Turturro) will be coming along soon. Also returning is Milchick (Tramell Tillman) and newcomer Miss Huang (Sarah Bock). We’ll be hearing from Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) coming up later as well. If we’re patient, we might even know a little more about Mark’s late wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman).

There’s a liminality to this show that is somehow both retro and fresh. I cannot do justice to the sound and set design. On my review of the first season I called the environment almost dystopian. I wasn’t fair, it’s deeply so with brutalist architecture and a mute palette borrowed from the ultimate soulless corporate hellish landscape. This makes things like finding a goat rather jarring. Yes, I said a goat. No, I am not explaining that. The show is not only a psychological thriller, but a very dark corporate satire with some hints towards existential horror.

The plot of the second season is not something easily explainable. Reveals abound, as we’re following a non-linear narrative where it’s up to us if we’re in a flashback, a flash forward or the character’s POV is being messed up by a hallucinatory memory. I know it sounds complex but it goes down easy given that most audiences are sophisticated enough to know the concept of timelines. None of the characters have canonically gone back in time yet, but the narrative does and often.

Extremely recommended. It is both inventive and darkly comedic, with some horror aspects that spice up the mystery. The drama of relationships gets thrown further into the mix, but never in a way that feels romantic. This is a show that seems to get more fun the more complicated it gets. Worth a watch so far, but I would strongly recommend you start with the first season. Happy binging.

That will do for now.