Of all the grave errors in my life that have cost me my dignity, there is none I truly regret more than the egregious mistake I made in January 2025. I had heard that Severance, the Ben Stiller directed thriller series, was coming back for a second season starting January 17. In a dizzy haze of euphoria, I had agreed to write an article discussing my opinion. Imagine my dismay when I opened up AppleTV, a site that I use and pay for frequently, and found not a season of television, but a single episode—“Hello, Ms. Cobel.”
Television, as the medium has changed, has done away with the weekly episode release format on the whole. Nowadays, it rarely feels like there is any appreciable difference between watching a series and watching a long, somewhat episodic indie movie—nothing ever resets, the narrative never concludes. Little is done to set episodes apart from each other other than the vague outlines of narrative beats. This makes binge watching easier, but it also makes each episode have less weight on its own. Severance, with its return to weekly episode updates that Apple TV has been using on its original properties, did not need this boost to keep each of season 2’s episodes stand out in their own right, but it didn’t hurt.
Severance follows four characters who have all been mentally split in two by the titular surgical procedure—they have personas which exist inside of their office in Lumon Industries, and they have their lives on the outside. By the end of season 1, the four main characters—Mark, Irving, Dylan, and Helly—hatched a plan to hijack their own brains and escape to their outside lives. The plan worked, and the main characters learn several new and disturbing things—notably, that Helly has secretly been Helena Eagan, the heiress of Lumon Industries, and that Mark’s deceased wife Gemma was not dead at all, but rather continued to live inside the walls of Lumon as Ms. Casey, unaware of her old life or her connection to Mark.
From this backdrop, the second season spends most of its time fleshing out the world of the show, specifically looking at where Lumon came from and what it exists to do. The deviation from social commentary to high-concept science fiction wasn’t unexpected, but it did detract a bit from my interest in the show as something unique. There are other good sci-fi shows with compelling concepts—Silo, Pluribus, and things that also aren’t on Apple TV—but I didn’t feel hooked by any of Severance’s original dystopian concepts more than I was intrigued by the discussion of the merits of consuming bad art as a means of connecting with others, for example.
Season two instead takes a closer look at individual characters and how they interact with the world of Severance. Helly, for example, has a deeply riveting and viscerally uncomfortable relationship with the woman sharing her body, Helena Eagan. She grapples with her own bodily autonomy, the relationships she has with the other characters, and the ways in which she thinks about the mechanisms of her own mind. Also of great importance to myself, as a diehard Patricia Arquette fan, was the exploration of Ms. Cobel’s character in the episode “Sweet Vitriol”. The episode tackles the life story and emotional turmoil that Ms. Cobel has carried through her upbringing into the present day, and while it has nothing to do with the rest of the deeper philosophical themes of the show, I cannot pretend that my favorite part of the season wasn’t Ms. Cobel’s brilliantly acted crashout in the last five minutes.
Overall, the new season of Severance takes the world of the show in a bold new direction, expanding on its old strengths while exploring new facets of its premise. Patricia Arquette still takes home my heart.