Only workers left alive

A girl once told me that Colin Firth was clearly Mr Darcy in the streets, but given his Mamma Mia! dance moves, must be disco in the sheets. The charming "in the streets/in the sheets" phrase exposes our duality.

- RAJA SEN

A girl once told me that Colin Firth was clearly Mr Darcy in the streets, but given his Mamma Mia! dance moves, must be disco in the sheets. The charming "in the streets/in the sheets" phrase exposes our duality. The first part is about our public-facing persona, the second who we are behind closed doors. "Obama in the streets, Osama in the sheets." "Times New Roman in the streets, Wingdings in the sheets." We all have sides. The regal can be ridiculous, the demure depraved. It's thrilling that we each contain multitudes, but the trick is knowing when to switch.

Severance is about that switch being a literal one. Created by Dan Erickson, the Apple TV+ series stunned us in 2022 with a fully formed vision of a future where people were voluntarily undergoing brain-transplants in order to achieve work-life balance. That first season was perfect science-fiction, cool and confounding and unlike anything else out there. That idea of compartmentalisation, merely in order to function, taken to such a drastic extreme seemed both ludicrous (in the streets) while alarmingly plausible (in the sheets).

The show is set around the cryptic, cult-like Lumon organisation, where a group of "innies" work on a severed floor: their "outies" come to office, clock in, and wake up when they leave the office. In the interim, the innies—who literally know only the workplace—work on something without being told why. (In the first season, one of them speculated that they might be removing swear words from movies.) They are told only that the work is mysterious and important, and in these cases we mostly take the word of those signing the cheques.