‘Severance’ Season 2 Review: Apple TV’s Dark Workplace Thriller Gets Bigger and Stranger

The creators of series like Severance face a particularly thorny challenge when they have to follow up a successful first season. One tends to assume that, broadly speaking, the overall arc of the show has been mapped out from the start, that the creators know where everything is heading. If that is the case—and it often isn’t, as many showrunners have openly admitted—the real difficulty lies in how to get there: how much time it should take, what narrative devices or sleights of hand to employ, and what aesthetic strategies to lean on along the way.

Severance presents an especially complex case because it is not a conventional series. It is neither a straightforward realist drama nor a comedy, nor fully a work of fantasy. It is a blend of all of those things, and probably a few others as well. So where should the second season dig deeper? Into the emotional lives and inner turmoil of its characters? Into the absurdity of living two separate lives inside a single body? Or further into the show’s increasingly strange mythology and the many mysteries surrounding Lumon—from the very specific process that “splits” its employees’ brains to the true intentions of this eccentric corporation?

Dan Erickson, the show’s creator (Ben Stiller is the producer, directed several episodes, and is its most visible public face, but Severance ultimately springs from Erickson’s mind), has chosen not to narrow the focus but to go bigger. More intensity, more mythology, more emotion, more humor—and, unmistakably, more budget. The results so far (six of the ten episodes were made available to the press) are more than intriguing. The series expands the universe we already knew and pushes it into more ambitious, more complicated territory. It is bizarre and baroque, with moments that feel as though they could have been directed by David Lynch, yet it remains grounded in the emotional sincerity of its characters.

Severance is a strange, extravagant series populated by recognizably human figures. That is what prevents its dense mythology—the aspect that drives Reddit users into obsessive decoding—from feeling hollow or like a narrative trick designed to mislead. Some of the strongest scenes this season have little or nothing to do with secrets or revelations: an unsettling dinner, an unexpected meeting at a restaurant, an awkward hug. These moments form the solid core that holds everything together. Without the confusion and emotional distress of its four protagonists—who are, in truth, eight people, split between their Lumon selves and their outside selves—the show would collapse into emptiness. It might still be clever and surprising, but it would feel hollow. Thanks to its characters, it never does.

SPOILERS FOR SEASON ONE AND THE BEGINNING OF SEASON TWO

At the end of the first season, the innies—the work versions of the characters—of the four members of the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department manage, briefly, to access their outie lives and learn something about who they are outside Lumon. Mark (Adam Scott) discovers that his wife Gemma may still be alive and could be the same woman his innie knows at Lumon as Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman). Irving (John Turturro) learns that his outie paints disturbingly dark images and that his beloved Burt (Christopher Walken) is in a relationship. Dylan (Zach Cherry) had already learned that his outie has a family. Most surprising of all is Helly’s revelation—shared with the audience—that outside Lumon she is the daughter of the company’s owner and its primary heir.

When the second season begins, Mark returns to Lumon only to find that none of his coworkers are there. Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) has become the floor manager, replacing Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who has been removed from her position, and he is now assisted by a mysterious young girl (Sarah Bock). Mark’s former colleagues have been replaced by new workers (played by Bob Balaban, Alia Shawkat, and Italian actor Stefano Carannante), but Mark refuses to accept the change and demands that the original team be brought back. After consulting with higher authorities—including Helena—Milchick agrees, making it clear that Lumon needs them and that their work is important.

The first two episodes are split between inside Lumon and the outside world. They function as a recalibration, helping the audience reorient itself after the first season’s revelations. Milchick claims improvements have been made to enhance life on the severed floor, but—as with almost everything Lumon promises—this proves largely untrue. Mark searches for Casey/Gemma inside and cannot find her. The innies share what they learned about their outies, though not all of them are fully honest. Tensions and suspicions begin to surface. Outside, Mark continues trying to break through the barriers separating his two selves, while the series also devotes more time to Helena in her role as a corporate executive.

Amid all this, Severance keeps expanding the physical and conceptual territory of Lumon, especially its mythology: its relationship with animals, the mysteries of its offices, and the secret of what the company actually does. Starting with the third episode, the series begins to break away from its established mechanics, incorporating new spaces and increasingly extravagant possibilities. Its settings start to evoke something closer to Being John Malkovich, with more twists, more narrative traps, and a growing sense that the two worlds—inside and outside—may begin to communicate with each other, albeit in confusing and unstable ways. At the same time, the characters’ personal and emotional lives continue to intensify, not always with the outcomes they hope for.

Severance widens its field of meaning, deepening a mythology that feels closer to Lost than to Twin Peaks—in the sense that it appears to have an internal logic and coherence—while also pushing its formal ambitions to the brink of surrealism, something hinted at by the revamped opening credits sequence. It may feel like too much, and perhaps it is at times, but what Erickson and his collaborators achieve, particularly from the third or fourth episode onward, is an expansion of the show’s visual and thematic palette without completely losing sight of its human core.

That is the real secret of Severance: constructing a strong, compelling central mystery while never neglecting the people trying to unravel it. At heart, the series is about work—about the relationship between office life and the lives people lead outside it, about the compartmentalization of spaces and emotions, and about how working long hours, as the employees of Lumon do, can become a way to avoid confronting real problems, even deep personal trauma, that exist beyond that seemingly impersonal workplace.

In the second season, the characters grow and previously unexplored dimensions of each one emerge. Orbiting an increasingly disturbed Adam Scott—an actor who does not always fully convince but is undeniably effective at conveying “strangeness”—Britt Lower is especially fascinating, playing multiple versions of a character surrounded by secrets and seemingly the only one who truly understands what is going on. Turturro, Cherry, and Tillman also contribute significantly to shaping the drama around the mystery, with Milchick now almost as central as the main quartet. Walken and Arquette appear less frequently up to episode six, but when they do, their impact is unmistakable. Walken, in particular, does remarkable work with very little material—something that should be remembered when awards season comes around.

Watching it, I found myself thinking that Severance could be seen as a more complex, more intellectually ambitious—and above all, cooler—version of Squid Game. At a deeper level, both series are about the same thing: damaged people entering a psychologically and emotionally violent “workplace” where survival is the goal, while forces outside attempt to dismantle that system. The key difference is that here the conflict is less between peers and more between workers and those who manipulate and control them. Ultimately, both shows explore how to break a dominant narrative imposed by those in power, a narrative that governs people’s actions. It is not easy in either series—and it seems even less so in real life.