Severance has to be one of the biggest surprises of the year for me. I admit, when I saw the poster and the cast, I brushed it off as another workplace sitcom that I’d likely forget about after a month. A few weeks later, I saw its glowing reviews and decided to watch the first episode. I liked it, and was intrigued by the premise, but I wasn’t blown away. But with little else to do, I clicked on the next episode. And last night, after binging this show for about a week and a half, I came to a conclusion that I didn’t expect when I started the show (or even when I began watching the finale, in all honesty).

Severance might just be a masterpiece.

Now, what exactly is Severance? Severance is a thrilling workplace satire about a company named Lumon that has its employees undergo a procedure known as severance (Hey, that’s the name of the show!), which separates its workers’ outside memories from their work memories. Their work lives and their home lives are kept completely apart, as when they are at Lumon, they cannot remember anything about who they are outside, and when they are at home, they do not recall any events that transpired at their job. Our protagonist is Mark Scout (Adam Scott), who has been severed for 2 years and is perfectly content stating that way. The pilot begins with the arrival of Helly R. (Britt Lower), a newly severed employee who joins Mark’s department. While the show is initially fairly slow, the intrigue only increases as the plot unfolds. You’re given droplets of juicy information each episode that keeps you coming back for more. You slowly learn more about what is truly going on here, and yet continue to have more questions than answers. The last 3 episodes do an especially great job at this, as they give you a lot of crucial information that recontextualizes certain aspects of certain events in prior episodes. The pacing also picks up in these episodes, and you start feeling truly rewarded for investing so much time into this show. However, while the mystery is great, the story’s best feature has to be its characters and their dynamics.

Even when the show was slow, the characters of Severance always kept my attention. The people in the “outside world,” so to speak, were well-acted and charming enough. However, the characters who were a part of the Lumon world were far more interesting. Most of them are severed, and with the exception of Mark, we do not get to see their outer selves often. The mystery of who these severed employees are outside of work is something that lingers both on their minds and on the audience’s. Their development over the course of the season and the deepening of their relationships with each other were both very compelling. In particular, the bond between our main four characters (Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan) was believable and very well-written. I was surprised by how much I grew to care about these four. The finale does a stellar job at demonstrating how they’ve grown through the season, and each of them get a satisfying cap on their arcs. The two main antagonistic presences in this show, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Milchick (Tramell Tillman), are consistently eerie, although I do think they are a tad carried by their performances.

Speaking of which, the acting in this show is fantastic. There’s no real weak link to be found. Every performance is layered and nuanced, and they all clearly have a grasp on their characters. The ensemble is simply brilliant. My personal favorite has to be Britt Lower as Helly R, who captures her character’s defiance exceptionally and is especially wonderful in the finale. However, each actor impressed me, no matter how large or small their roles were.

While I’ve made fairly clear how much I love almost every element of this show, there is one aspect that stood out for me above all else. You probably guessed this after reading the title, but the direction of Severance is simply stunning. Even before I fell in love with this show, I was blown away by its direction. Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle have both carefully crafted masterful episodes that are visually immaculate and balance drama, tension, and comedy perfectly. Everything is so precisely done, from the color grading to the symmetry present throughout. Theodore Shapiro’s excellent score is also always paired well with the scenes it’s featured in. It’s so difficult to imagine Severance without its top-notch direction, and I’m very excited to see what these two directors do next.

I do have a few issues with Severance, however. For one, the first few episodes were a bit too slow for my liking. I wasn’t immediately invested in the story or in these characters until about episode 4. The world inside Lumon was also generally more interesting to me than the shenanigans that went on outside, so in the beginning I did occasionally find myself wanting the show to cut back to the office whenever we were in the POV of Mark’s outside self. That being said, these flaws were minor to me and didn’t really impact my experience once I was deep into the series.

All in all, I highly recommend watching Severance. Yes, it may take a couple of episodes for the pace to pick up, but it is an exhilarating ride that you won’t regret watching after you’ve finished. It’s a gorgeous, well-written, and thrilling show that keeps growing on me the more I think about it. It is worth every penny of the $4.99 AppleTV+ subscription.

10/10