Why viewers are hooked on ‘Severance’ and work-life balance

On By Littum

North East workplace expert Sam Waterman says the show’s popularity could be part of a nostalgia for a capitalist concept that took hold during the Victorian era.

Main photo by Patrick Daly

A screenshot from the show Severance.
Adam Scott and Britt Lower return for Season 2 of ‘Severance’ on Apple TV+, a show about a drastic separation of work and personal life

LONDON – A healthy balance is created between work and private life – and then there is the extreme of having the two surgically separated.

That’s the premise behind the popular TV series “Resignation“, which has captured millions of viewers since its release in 2022.

The Emmy-winning Apple TV show follows the lives of a team of office workers who undergo a procedure that erases all memory of their personal lives while at work. And the same is true in reverse – once clocked from their jobs at Lumon Industries, the characters don’t remember what they did all day.

With Season 2 will begin airing on Friday, January 17 – a new section of the 10-part series is scheduled to drop weekly on the streaming platform — fans will finally find out more about the workers and their search for the truth about their out-of-office.

Sam Watermanan expert on histories and theories of work at Northeastern University, says the idea of ​​dividing home and work flourished in the 19th century as societies became more capitalist.

“The rigid separation between work life and home life is a Victorian invention – or at least one that develops in the run-up to the Victorian period,” he says.

“You can think of that as a compensatory relationship. One thing capitalism does is really rationalize the workday and make people behave like efficient machines. And then you have this highly sentimentalized and romanticized home life afterwards with the family.”

Waterman, an assistant professor of English at Northeastern’s London campus, points to Charles Dickens’ novel “Great Expectations,” published in 1861, which contained an example of the type of split personality that could exist in Victorian times, when work and home were seen as things to be kept separate.

The character John Wemmicka barrister, is a “starkly commercial figure” in Dickens’s story, says Waterman, but the cozy cottage home to which he retires each night is idyllic with its surrounding moat and drawbridge.

“It’s this incredibly sentimentalized scene of personal domestic life,” Waterman continues. “Wemmick won’t allow any talk of home at work or any talk of work at home, so there’s this sort of separation between the different people.”

Waterman argues that the popularity of “Severance” could be related to a nostalgia for the separation to exist again – a reaction to our modern and technologically driven world, where the lines between work and home are blurred like never before.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced workers to adapt to full-time remote work and mix family and co-workers together through Zoom calls. With work-related WhatsApp groups on our mobile phones or the Slack chat app just a click away, it can be difficult to put distance between business and pleasure.

Main image by Tomas Elliott
English academic Tomas Elliott says ‘Severance’ explores the idea that being able to separate ourselves from the outside world is a ‘complete illusion’. Courtesy photo

It was during the cultural revolution of the 1960s that business leaders first began to heed calls for the workplace to become more welcoming to women and a diversity of personalities, Waterman explains, citing the 1999 book “The new spirit of capitalism,” written by sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.

“The early integration of home and work for a while was perhaps quite appealing to a lot of people,” Waterman continues, “because it allowed them to be more human in the workplace. But then I think something that happens afterwards, is that we begin to feel, ‘Well, do I really want to bring my full self to the workplace? Do I really want to give my whole soul to my work?’

“And then you get things like the pandemic that blur the lines even more, where the actual physical space of the home is blurred. And so I wonder if something like ‘Severance,’ while also dystopian, is also nostalgic for an older division between work and home life.”

Thomas Elliotta specialist in the history of theater and film, argues that the dystopian nature of “Severance” – starring Adam Scott and Britt Lower – sees it play out almost like “The Matrix”, the 1999 Keanu Reeves film, in reverse. .

There are even similarities in the way it’s shot. The green hue of scenes filmed inside “The Matrix” — a virtual reality that people are connected to — is replaced in the Ben Stiller-directed episodes of “Severance” with the stark white walls and seemingly endless corridors of the Lumon office block.

“‘The Matrix’ spoke to anxieties about the growing digitization of the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” says Elliott, “and this feeling of being trapped and no longer in control of it reality.

“The hero is the one who recognizes its illusory reality and becomes a hero arc for Neo (played by Reeves) to take the red pill and dare to know the truth. ‘Severance’ seems to explore an inversion of this narrative by depicting a world where people can choose to go back to a ‘Matrix’ of sorts.

“You have these people who have been put in an office space against their will. They have no choice as to whether they go to work or not. And in fact their whole existence is within work. They can’t even quit, unless their personality in the outer world decides to allow them to quit, so they are endlessly trapped and there is no escape from that workplace for them.”

The Northeastern assistant professor of English, who is currently researching the post-pandemic rise in recurring birth nightmares in horror stories, says the series seems to draw on the sense of being digitally trapped that some people feel in Western society .

“I wonder if ‘Severance’ is a way of exploring a heightened sense of the totalization of the digital world that we experience today,” says the London-based academic. “That the dream of completely separating ourselves — of being able to get completely away from global networks of data, capitalism, social media, etc. — is a complete illusion.”

He points to Scott’s character Mark and the fact that his decision to become a so-called “disconnected” employee is driven by grief experienced in his personal life. But separating his work and personal personalities doesn’t seem to satisfy him, Elliott claims.

“Mark created this separation as a way of dealing with grief, with trauma,” says Elliott. “But it doesn’t seem to have given him any release so far. There doesn’t seem to be any healing going on.

“I think it points to the idea that something like work-life balance, something like separation, is actually a kind of fetish. It’s something that’s been created by capitalism itself as a kind of illusory goal to make us feel happier about our lives.”

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