Overheard a buddy say 'Severance is just office drama with a sci-fi hat' and now I can't defend it

He said it while we were grabbing coffee last Tuesday and honestly it made me rethink why I binge watched the whole first season in one sitting, anyone else feel like the concept carries the show more than the characters?

3 comments

3 Comments

torres.grant24d ago

The real trick with Severance is that the office drama IS the sci-fi. Like your friend is right on the surface but he's missing that the mundane parts are the whole point. The sci-fi concept works because it turns boring corporate stuff like meetings and paperwork into something creepy and existential. Imagine watching a show about people staring at computer screens and it somehow makes you feel unsettled about your own job, that's the magic. The characters are actually super well done too, you just don't notice because they're written to be deliberately empty and broken on purpose. That emptiness is the character development, not a weakness.

val_williams24d ago

You make a good point about the emptiness being intentional, but I watched the whole first season and those characters still felt flat to me. Even if they're supposed to be broken on purpose, that doesn't automatically make it good writing or fun to watch. The sci-fi concept is great, but I need someone to actually care about to stay invested.

the_joseph20d ago

Wait hold on, did you just say you watched the whole first season and still thought the characters were flat? That's wild to me. Mark's whole arc with Gemma and the weird wife stuff, Irving's obsessive painting of the dark hallway, Helly literally trying to kill herself to escape - that felt like real character work to me. Maybe it's just not clicking for you because the show makes you do some of the work yourself, which I get can be annoying. But calling it flat feels like missing the point of how carefully those performances are built.