The genius of Severance’s Grand Central Pop-Up stunt

Ccommuters rushing through Grand Central Station on Tuesday were treated to a strange sight: A glass cube filled with actors in business casual mimicking the mundane motions of office work. But if you stopped for a minute – as many did – it looked a little wonky. The computers were not sleek Apple displays, but old-fashioned data processors. And yes, one of those actors was Adam Scott, star of Apple’s hit sci-fi drama Resignationwhich returns for a highly anticipated second season on January 17.

For the uninitiated, the show centers on a group of workers who have agreed to undergo the process of severance, brain surgery that separates their work lives from their personal lives. The characters refer to these two people as “innies” and “outies”. The Outies enter the offices of the mysterious company Lumon and take an elevator down to the windowless “cut-off floor,” whereupon their “innie” bell rings. Their insides, on the other hand, live a nightmarish existence. They are trapped inside Lumon’s offices, condemned to work on a boring but mysterious project, never to see the light of day – until late in the series’ first season, the workers decide to rebel.

In the run-up to Friday’s premiere, The Apple TV+ marketing team reinvented Dismissal’s dull-chic cubicle inside a glass case in the iconic station’s Vanderbilt Hall, a place whose grandeur belies the drudgery that afflicts so many of the commuters who cross it. Actors from the show, including Scott, Britt Lower, John Turturro and Zach Cherry, worked in their small office with Patricia Arquette and Tramell Tillman playing their bosses overseeing their work. At one point, Arquette’s character “punished” Scott’s character by forcing him to stand in a corner and stare at the spectators outside the box.

Unsurprisingly, the pop-up went viral on social media and generated largely favorable responses. Whether that will move the needle on Apple’s relatively modest streaming numbers, even for one of its crown jewels, remains to be seen. But measured by a gauge of (online) public sentiment – ​​does this make us happy with the product being marketed, or make us want to boycott it? – the pop-up was a resounding success.

Audiences have been treated to — or forced to endure, depending on how you look at it — an endless array of movie and TV marketing stunts over the past few years. There was Barbie attack, where Warner Bros. and Mattel plastered the iconic doll’s branding on products ranging from swimming pools to carpets. Movie star Margot Robbie literally dressed up as real Barbies for months. Meanwhile, Zendaya mastered the art of red carpet dressing, stunning in her tennis-inspired fits for Challengers and her futuristic looks too Dune: Part 2.

The Evil marketing team took pages out of both Barbie and Zendaya’s books: They produced Evil-macaroni and cheese, crocs and tequila, and dressed their stars in pink and green for every appearance on the red carpet, at junkets and even in the stands at the Olympics. (Barbie collaborated with 165 brands in 2023. Evil topped it off by teaming up with 400 brands in 2024.)

There are star-driven marketing games, like Timothée Chalamet’s latest epic race catering to virtually every demographic of moviegoers prior to the release of his Bob Dylan biography, A complete unknown. He wowed with his picks on College GameDay on ESPN, appeared in his own lookalike contest and (curiously) took to Instagram live to belt out the Black Eyed Peas song “I’ve Gotta Feeling.” We live in the time star Andrew Garfield’s flirtatious meal with Amelia Dimoldenberg on Chicken shop date went viral last fall, as did his tearful guest appearance on Modern love podcast.

Then there are the marketing campaigns that don’t rely on celebrities. Instead, they aim to go viral through shock value, such as eerily smiling fans sitting behind the dugout at a playoff game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Mets, promoting Smile 2or Bigfoot found wandering through Central Park last spring to promote Sasquatch sunset. Meanwhile, interactive experiences produced by shows like Play octopus invite fans to do it for the ‘gram.

Read more: Capitalism killed Play octopus

The Resignation stunt stands out because it combines both of these approaches: curiosity-inducing stunt multiplied by a factor of star power. Zendaya’s Thierry Mugler couture metallic suit may have caught fans’ attention, but her ability to pull off the futuristic piece makes her untouchable. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo “holding space” to the lyrics to “Defying Gravity” went viral because their highly emotional response seemed so out of the ordinary—at least to those of us non-theatre kids. These famous people are not like us.

It’s rare to see celebrities in the wild, let alone celebrities willing to sit in the middle of one of the busiest train stations in North America to be stared at like zoo animals. And while Scott hasn’t quite reached Zendaya-level fame, he’s probably too popular to take time out of his day to stage some kind of play in Midtown Manhattan on top of the weeks of interviews (including with this magazine) he’s already done to promote the show.

Ben Stiller, the director, executive producer and a key The creative force behind the show is certainly too famous to show up at this pop-up, let alone stand outside it among the crowd and take pictures on his smartphone like a proud father at his child’s dance recital. The fact that they all participated in the stunt speaks not only to their dedication to the show, but a willingness to meet the audience, literally, where they are.

And of course the stunt works on a deeper level. The workers at Lumon are under constant surveillance with no sense of privacy. Sticking the actors in a glass box emphasizes the eerie themes of the sci-fi series surveillance capitalism.

Resignation is the kind of puzzle-box show that attracts a rabid fanbase obsessed with piecing together the clues and cracking its mysteries: What is the evil Lumon corporation up to? Why is the company specifically keeping Adam Scott’s character Mark under surveillance? Why are there baby goats in Lumon’s offices? The pop-up caters not only to these fans, who have no doubt been delighted to look for even more Easter eggs inside the mini Lumon office, but also to passers-by on their daily commute who may never have seen an episode but will now thanks to this curiosity.

If only they had managed to recreate the show’s famous music/dance experience – or at least a waffle party.