There is perhaps no show on television with more attention around it than Apple TV+’s Severance. After finishing its second season earlier this year to near-universalacclaim, the show is on track to take home a truckload of Emmys this fall. The series’s immense success is due in no small part to the brilliant performances of its leads, including Adam Scott and Britt Lower, and its disorienting cinematography and visual palette. But even without those things, it’s hard to imagine that any show with a premise as immediately gripping as Severance’s would not get at least some attention.

Severance follows several employees of the tech company Lumon Industries who have been given a new form of brain surgery by the company. This procedure allows them to completely “sever” their work lives from their personal lives. When they descend an elevator into the vast, labyrinthine offices of Lumon, they forget everything they know about their lives at home, and when they leave, they remember nothing of the workday they just experienced. Each Lumon employee, therefore, exists as two essentially different individuals: an “outie,” who gets to live unburdened by the drudgery of their job, and an “innie” who knows nothing but work. The show quickly reveals this arrangement to be nightmarish, with the innies languishing as a functional servant class subject to unchecked control by their bosses. 

Socialist writers and magazines have been especially bullish on Severance. Manyessayists have called the Apple TV series a “Marxist” show, noting the echoes of Karl Marx’s ideas about workers becoming alienated from each other and their own humanity.Jacobin’s film critic Eileen Jones wrote in her very thorough review that the show is a “brutal satire of the American corporate structure.”

However, we should be inherently skeptical of anti-capitalism being packaged and sold to us by Apple, one of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. As Sean McDowell wrote for Current Affairs two years ago, popular streaming-based shows like Succession, The White Lotus, and Beef, which contain strong critiques of wealth and privilege, get green-lit not because streaming companies are trying to agitate against the system, but because they hope to profit by reflecting viewers’ growing disillusionment. But even if we look past this and just look at the art itself, Severance’s exploration of capitalism is more limited than many of the other shows that make up this trend because unlike these shows, it has little to say about how wealth and profit are the driving force behind the exploitation we witness.

Let’s start by talking about what Severance does well. It is easy to see why the series speaks to so many people at this particular moment in time. The show does a fantastic job lampooning a lot of the most absurd and pernicious aspects of modern corporate culture. Macro-Data Refinement, a job in which our main characters sit in cubicles sorting numbers on computer screens all day based on how the numbers “feel” to them, is the bullshit job to end all bullshit jobs. But your average corporate consultant, branding czar, or HR rep probably at least has some sense of why what they do all day is supposed to be important. In contrast, the employees in MDR are kept in the dark about the purpose of the data they “refine.” Mark (Adam Scott), the Data Refinement Chief and main character, has been reassured that the work is “mysterious and important” but knows little more than that. Some of the numbers, it turns out, are “scary” and need to be contained in a box at the bottom of the screen, but it’s never clear why. Much of the show’s drama surrounds the characters slowly unraveling these mysteries while the company tries to keep them in the dark. 

Most everything that happens in the bowels of Lumon has an air of bullshit to it that people who work office jobs may find familiar. Refiners, as they’re called, are given comedically meager “perks” that incentivize them to perform. These include nearly worthless tchotchkes like Lumon-branded erasers and finger traps or personalized caricature portraits. The company also offers micro-doses of levity like the “Music Dance Experience” (“MDE”) in which a refiner who reaches their goals gets to pick a song and an instrument and dance around the office for five minutes. Or there’s the “Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence” (“ORTBO”), a camping trip in a meticulously controlled compound which is given to the employees after they demand to see the outside world for the first time. Periodically, they are taken for “wellness sessions” where they are read bland statements of affirmation about their outie. (“Your outie is generous,” “Your outie likes films and owns a machine that can play them,” “Your outie is strong and helped someone lift a heavy object.”)

For those of us in the real world who get to experience life outside of work, things like office parties, team-building retreats, and wellness checks can often feel like patronizing mandatory fun. But for the employees of Lumon, these are some of the only moments of frivolity they get to experience, and their genuine excitement at such paltry rewards becomes a central dark joke of the series. But these perks are also used to manipulate and coerce them into obedience.

After one refiner, Dylan (Zach Cherry), learns that outside the office he has a wife and three children he’ll never get to meet,¹ he becomes irate. He’s only brought back into line when the opportunity to have short visitations with his wife in the office becomes one of his rewards. The threat of losing that tenuous connection to his family becomes a powerful tool the company uses to keep him from rebelling. The metaphor here is easy to spot. While we are not literally trapped in our jobs like these characters, our bosses have a similar kind of leverage over us. If we act out or make demands, we risk being fired, which doesn’t just affect us but also potentially our ability to provide for those we love.

Obedience is also enforced more directly. The employees in Severance live under intense surveillance. In season 2, it was revealed that each refiner has their own “watcher” whose job is to monitor their performance through a hidden camera in their computer. This is only barely more invasive than the kind of surveillance that workers in real life already endure, where bosses use webcams, keystroke trackers, and even biometric data to keep employees from perpetrating “time theft”—that is, any action that’s not directly work-related—or, worse, unionizing. But in the world of Severance, there is an additional dystopian surveillance similar to the all-seeing “code detection” devices used to determine whether employees are attempting to smuggle messages to the outside world.

Employees who misbehave in Severance are taken to the “break room,” a dark chamber where they are forced to read a statement of contrition (“Forgive me for the harm I have caused this world… I am thankful to have been caught, my fall cut short by those with wizened hands”) over and over, sometimes thousands of times, until a polygraph test proves they mean it sincerely. With no other frame of reference for virtue, work performance becomes the only source of self-worth, one that the characters internalize. (“I’m smart, that’s why I have three times as many finger traps as you guys,” says Dylan at one point.) 

    What takes the place of morality are the edicts of the company’s founder, Kier Eagan, who is treated as a deity, with portraits, hymns, and creepy talking wax statues in his and his family’s honor found all across Lumon. Upper management speaks of their mission to “serve” Kier, who is described as the “chosen one.” Employees are schooled in his “Nine Core Principles” as a sort of religious doctrine, all of which are meant to sculpt model employees who are unflinching in their pursuit of the company’s goals. They are expected to exhibit “Verve” (“Rise from your deathbed and sally forth, more perfect for the struggle”), “Wiles” (“May my cunning acumen slice through the fog of small minds, guiding them to their great purpose in labor”), and “Nimbleness” (“...Be not led astray by those weak of will.”) 

Kier’s nuggets of wisdom bear a striking resemblance to the austere “grindset” mantras that America’s elite have begun to adopt, something I have previously written about in greater detail. And while the upper management’s treatment of Kier as a visionary Übermensch is played for laughs, it’s only slightly more grandiose than the sort of hero worship that tech CEOs like Elon Musk receive from their underlings.

Severance is as funny and cutting as any show I’ve seen when it comes to mocking the absurd rituals of the workplace—from insipid corporate jargon to the authoritarian control that tech has allowed bosses to increasingly exert over our lives. But while it takes a lot of jabs at the symptoms of modern capitalism, the show often shies away from examining the underlying reason all of this manipulation and control exists in the first place: profit. The tendrils of capitalism extend into every aspect of our lives. Everything we eat, wear, listen to, read, and watch is controlled in some way by an entity that exists solely to squeeze every possible dollar out of its workforce. And often, the things that make our lives convenient—our iPhones, Amazon Prime, our fast food and supermarket chains—are built on top of a mass of exploited labor. In short, all the things we have only exist as long as they make someone a lot of money.

A lot of media portrays corporate overlords as cynical and money-hungry. But money never really comes up at all in Severance. Rather, its upper managers are portrayed as single-minded religious fanatics, interested only in furthering the transhumanist project of Kier Eagan. It’s really not clear how Lumon makes money, nor is it clear that its proprietors care about it at all, which marks them as categorically different from the capitalists who rule our world.

What seems clear is that Lumon doesn’t profit much from the severance procedure itself. Unlike the technology that has made the CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon fabulously wealthy, severance is not a ubiquitous part of everyday life and is instead a new procedure in its infancy. Those who are not severed view it with skepticism or outright hostility, and outies who are severed are shown to face hiring discrimination if they attempt to find other jobs. In the real world, a lot of us are blind to the brutal conditions behind the products we buy, or are at least willing to passively accept them for the sake of convenience. But the characters outside of Lumon are generally quite woke to the fact that severance is bad news.

The motivations behind severance feel similarly askew. While the show is often described as a commentary on the concept of “work-life balance,” employees being overworked or finding their jobs mind-numbing has little to do with the characters’ decisions to become severed. The fact that work sucks so much that people will do anything to forget it seems like it would be one of the richest veins for critique a show like this could find. While I’d personally never sever the part of myself that writes for Current Affairs, I can think of a lot of people I know who’d gladly choose to forget everything from their work lives, even if it meant trapping a version of themselves as a perpetual barista or Old Navy cashier. Even the show’s creator, Dan Erickson, has said he got the idea while working at a door factory where his job was to catalog hinges, a job so dull that he desired to jump to the end of the day.

But the reasons our main characters decided to become severed, as far as we know, had nothing to do with escaping the conditions of their jobs. Mark did it after his wife, Gemma, suddenly died in a car accident; he wanted to create a version of himself that didn’t have to live with the grief—an explanation that really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since he still spends the majority of his time outside of work appearing lost and depressed. Helly (Britt Lower), we learn at the end of season 1, is a member of the Eagan family who underwent severance as a Lumon propaganda stunt to prove the procedure was safe. We get almost no insight into why our other two main characters, Dylan and Irving (John Turturro), underwent the procedure.

Higher pay would be another reason someone might choose severance over the job they currently hold, even if it meant becoming a human lab rat. But we get no indication in the show of how the severed employees are actually paid. Some fans have tried to piece it together—it’s been pointed out that Mark’s Lumon-subsidized apartment (a nod to company towns old and new) is pretty shabby-looking, and that Dylan’s wife has to work nights, which seems to indicate that they don’t make very much. However, a book called The Lexington Letter, written by the show’s creators to expand its lore, suggests that they are offered salaries several times greater than their old jobs as an incentive to undergo the procedure. It’s weird that such a critical detail was left out of the TV show, but the fact that it was tells us a lot about the limits of how far the series is willing to go with its social commentary.

The things that are meant to disturb us, make us cringe, or make us laugh in Severance are all results of Lumon and the severance procedure itself. We are meant to focus on the things that make the company strange and alien: its cultlike atmosphere and endless, sprawling mysteries. We are meant to think to ourselves, “Thank God I don’t work there!” But if the show were truly trying to make a broader statement about work, we’d need to see some evidence that Lumon is not the only bad company in this world. We’d need to see what makes work so unbearable that people volunteer to fundamentally alter their brains in order to avoid ever having to think about it again. That’s exactly what we don’t get. In other words, Severance is not really about capitalism, it’s just about severance.

To be clear, that’s completely OK. While I can appreciate a strong, clear-eyed piece of principled agitprop, a complete political message is not always necessary to create a good piece of art. I’m not going to dock the show points because its characters don’t talk like the protagonists in Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel, always making speeches about the plight of the worker and the greed of the capitalist class. (In fact, it’s probably better that they don’t.) I’m attached enough to these characters and intrigued enough by the mystery that I still find the show quite riveting. 

It is also very possible that in later seasons, the show will make more of an effort to answer these questions, and its world will become more fleshed out. The end of season 2 brought us a major step in that direction with the revelation that Gemma was actually alive and being used as a test subject for new versions of the severance procedure for other unpleasant tasks like flying on airplanes and going to the dentist. This brings us a bit closer to understanding Lumon’s grand ambitions (and why the employees of MDR are sorting numbers). But for the show to make a real, coherent statement about work, we need to better understand the world outside Lumon and how it could make something like Lumon possible in the first place.

    In its defense, Severance is clearly meant to burn slowly, and we shouldn’t expect it to reveal all the layers of its world at once. But that mysterious quality also makes it somewhat maddening to glean any clear political critique. For now, the showcan be what it is — a gripping dystopian mystery series that contains a lot of sharp humor about office bullshit. But let’s also all try to temper ourselves here and not treat a $3 trillion corporation like it’s doing something revolutionary with its latest programming.

1. Dylan discovers his son through a process called the “Overtime Contingency,” which allows the company to briefly contact innies even when they are outside the office. Innie Dylan is woken up in his outie’s home and finds himself playing with a child, which he realizes is his son. This plot point becomes important to the story later when [SPOILER] the innies attempt to use it to escape and warn the world about severance.