‘Severance’ Perfectly Captures What It Feels Like to “Return To Office” in 2022

Apple TV+’s Severance should feel like a more sinister version of The Office or Office Space. It’s a workplace thriller about a mysterious corporation and the godlike power they wield over the office drones they employ. These human workers are severed, mentally cut off from their lives outside of work. Employees at the mega-corp, like Adam Scott’s middle-management Mark, voluntarily undergo a process that splits their lives and memories in half. The person they are at work (nicknamed an “Innie”) has no memory of who they are on the outside. They exist to do the work. And as for the employee (nicknamed an “Outie”), they get the dubious “benefit” of having their 8-hour day pop by in a blink of an eye. They can’t bring their work home with them because they have no memory of it. This heightened, horror-tinged premise should feel like fiction… so why does it feel so much like fact right now?

There’s a cruel symmetry between the Innies in Severance and the millions of real people who have been forced back to the office to work in isolation and obscurity under a sky of fluorescent lights. It’s called RTO, “return to office,” which is a snappy nickname that reduces two years of hard, emotional labor spent by employees forging new means of collaboration and camaraderie during horrific circumstances — frequently to newer heights of success — into just a little forgettable hiccup. Going back to the way things were before the pandemic is as easy as RTO!

That exact kind of blank corporate enthusiasm is what you get in Severance. This is a show where Innies wake up confused and then spend way too much time navigating a maze of never-ending hallways. Just last week, I showed up to a floor I’d never seen before and spent the day wandering hallways that all looked the same, discovering secret rooms for meetings (occupancy: 6) and “wellness” (occupancy: 1), all of them coated in the same sterile off-white color.

To placate the Innies of Severance, the fictional Lumon Industries tosses prizes like finger traps and waffle parties to their employees for meeting quotas. Of course the Innies don’t know what they’re doing, really; they’re just grabbing the numbers on screen that make them feel a certain type of way. At least instead of finger traps, workers in the real world are given perks like touch-less bathroom doors, swanky kitchenettes, privacy pods for phone calls (or screaming!), free snacks, etc.

The RTO reality that we’re returning to can’t be the same as it was before 2020, and no amount of corporate cheerleading can change that. The hybrid model of RTO, a few days a week in their office and the rest of the week in our office, mirrors the staggering arrivals and departures made in Mark’s Macrodata Refinement division. All four employees enter and exit alone to prevent their Outies from meeting; they all stay way more than six feet apart.

But this “hybrid model” is antithetical to RTO’s whole cover story and makes our lives feel even more severed. How can one collaborate or take part in “office culture” when 90% of your floor opted to work on another day of the week? This turns what was surely one of Severance’s more extreme aesthetic choices —four members of one department huddled together in the center of a spacious, empty room and endless unoccupied square footage — into our new lived reality. You’re at work, and so are three other people on the other end of the floor, but where is everybody else?

All the signs of humanity that at least made office space feel lived-in, coffee mugs and photographs and cartoon strips and action figures and greeting cards and kooky knickknacks, have no place in the new office. Understandably so; it stands in the way of necessary sterilization. Why work alone from home if you can work alone from the office, from a space that is not yours?

The solution to these perk-filled floors sitting empty as employees lurch into work on different days of the week is, of course, to chip away at the hybrid model. As time passes, companies anticipate their hybrid models going from one day a week to two, then probably three days a week, and where does it end after that? The pandemic is going nowhere, in part because people — potentially maskless, unvaxxed people — are being made to go back to the office one, two, or more days a week. In Severance, on-the-job injuries are explained to the Outtie via a card on their windshield. The injuries suffered at work carry over into their outside life, but at least they get a gift card to a bland chain restaurant. The more scientists study COVID, the more we’ve come to realize that this isn’t just another flu. Not only can COVID adapt to all of our vaccines and boosters in unexpected ways, but there are long term cognitive issues associated with COVID that we don’t yet understand. Work requires you to go to work where you could catch a disease that might make it harder for you to do your work… but here’s a gift card to Dave & Buster’s (masks not required for entry).

When Severance debuted in February, it was a grim, extreme reminder of what office life was like before we all took shelter in our homes and carved out a new way of living — not a better way of living, but a safer way of dealing with the now. We had no idea that what Severance put on screen would soon be a collective lived experience as we all returned to offices for no concrete reason on a seemingly inevitable march back to “normal.” That’s life when there are numbers to grab, but unlike the Innies and Outies on Severance, we carry the weight of it all on our commutes home.

Stream Severance on Apple TV+