The Best Show On TV？ Matt Walsh Reviews ＂Severance＂
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
206.60193
Summary
Severance is a show about a group of employees at a company called Lumen who don't remember anything about their lives outside of work, and when they do remember anything, it's in the basement of the building where they work.
Transcript
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You know, despite what you may think, we do actually listen to audience feedback around here.
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And one thing many of you have been saying is that you'd like to see me do more film and television reviews.
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And specifically, you'd like to know not just what I hate, but what I like, even though it's kind of more fun to talk about what you hate.
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But the plan for today is to talk about something that I like.
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This will be a short video to recommend what is, in my view, the best show on TV right now.
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I don't think any other show currently on air even really comes close.
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And if you haven't seen the show, I'll make sure not to spoil anything.
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You definitely want to go into the show knowing as little as possible about it.
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So Severance, produced and largely directed by Ben Stiller, there are other directors as well,
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is a show following a small group of employees at a company called Lumen.
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In this fictional world, some sort of technology has been developed that allows a person's consciousness
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So when they're at work, working on some very vague and mysterious project down in the basement of Lumen,
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they don't remember anything about their lives outside of work.
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And when they're not at work, they don't remember anything about their lives at work.
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So the work version of themselves essentially never leaves work.
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The non-working version essentially never goes to work.
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I'm not going to say anything else about the plot.
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There are three things that I like about this show.
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Three things that I think it does really well that many other shows don't do well or don't do at all.
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In a world of franchise films and sequels and remakes, it is possible to still tell original stories.
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Severance is obviously inspired by things that came before it.
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It's clear that the guy who wrote this show was a big fan of office space, for example.
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Severance has a similar view of workplace culture,
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the kind of mindless busy work that defines many office jobs.
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The humor kind of comes from a similar place in many cases.
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I'd say it's just as funny as office space, much, much darker, more thrilling, but still very funny as well.
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Storytellers should be inspired by other storytellers to come up with new stories
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that are influenced by, but not directly plagiarizing, what came before.
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You don't need to attempt a TV remake of office space.
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Just take whatever you love about it and inject it into a brand new story.
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It's the same thing I say about all these directors now who say,
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And so, of course, I'm so excited to be making a Star Wars movie or a Star Wars show in the Star Wars universe.
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No, if you're an actual talented filmmaker and you grew up watching Star Wars,
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rather than just making another Star Wars thing,
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tell your own story that has Star Wars influences.
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I'm kind of at the point now where I will try to watch at least almost any original show or film
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Even if they aren't good, I at least want to reward them for trying something new.
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And fortunately, Severance actually is very good.
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Two, Severance deals with interesting ideas, which is another thing that, you know,
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When most people talk about the show and the ideas that it grapples with,
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what they usually will talk about is the commentary on the modern workplace.
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But that, to me, is the less interesting theme.
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That's kind of window dressing for the far more fascinating exploration of human consciousness.
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Is your memory the only thing sort of holding you together and making you one individual?
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that if you take one person and you put them in two different settings
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and you make it so that they don't remember anything about themselves in the other setting,
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you'll end up with two distinct personalities and value systems and beliefs.
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And in effect, then, you end up with two selves in one person.
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And if memory is the one thing holding this kind of precarious Jenga tower that I call a self together,
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Which means that every person's self is based, at least partly, on a fiction.
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You are not really the sum total of your experiences,
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but rather you are the sum total of how you remember your experiences.
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And that seems to be what the show is driving at.
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And any show that actually gives you interesting things to think about is a win in my book.
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Depending on where you live, ISPs may be required to keep logs of your online activity
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just in case the government wants to take a peek.
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ISPs can legally sell your browsing history to whoever they want.
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It's an app that reroutes my online traffic through encrypted servers
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so my ISP can't access it and neither can data brokers or other third parties.
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If you're going to use a VPN, you really have to have confidence in it.
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clicking the link in the description box below,
00:06:02.980
And three, finally, severance is great for a reason that's going to seem very, very simple,
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And that is that in this show, stuff actually happens.
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And this is maybe the most radical thing about it.
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Each moment in the show leads to another moment.
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Now, there's a famous video that's worth watching if you haven't seen it
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of Matt Parker and Trey Stone, who are the South Park guys,
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each scene is linked together by the words, and then.
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You would say, well, this happens, and then this happens,
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and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens,
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But in a good, well-told story, in a good movie or a good show,
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each scene is linked together by the words, therefore, or but.
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And that's just another way of saying that a film or show should be propulsive.
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The train should be hurtling every moment towards a destination.
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But many shows and films these days are and-then stories.
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There's nothing in the story that really matters.
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It works this way because the studios want to milk each franchise for all it's worth.
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Well, first of all, each thing has to be a franchise, and then you have to milk it,
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which means that nothing can ever actually happen.
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I mean, Disney, notoriously, is so desperate to make sure that nothing happens in their films
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that they've even invented the multiverse so that if a character dies,
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he can be replaced by an infinite number of replacement versions of himself,
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which means, of course, that it doesn't matter if a character dies.
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The story just kind of floats along like debris.
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Severance, so far anyway, has not fallen prey to that.
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and there are physical and emotional consequences to everything that happens.
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There are moments here and there that don't work.
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It follows some threads every once in a while that I don't find especially interesting.
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As for the wokeness factor, you know, it's always a question.
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I would say that I'm not going to call this an anti-woke show.
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but to this point, they haven't leaned into that too much.
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He's there, but they don't beat you over the head with him.
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The biggest problem with Severance is that it's a show revolving around a central mystery,
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I can imagine as the writer, it's a lot of fun because it allows you to have a bunch of weird stuff happen.
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There's a lot of weird things always happening, and you're always being surprised, which is great.
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But the implication is that this weird, like, we don't know why this weird stuff is happening,
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And so it'll all be tied together in the end, and we're going to understand it.
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So you're kind of like writing this check that you have to cash later.
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And if the check bounces, if the answer isn't satisfying at the end of this whole thing,
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I mean, there are shows that have bad endings where it doesn't ruin the whole show.
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But if the whole show is built around a central mystery,
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and then the answer to the mystery is unsatisfying,
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So whether Severance ultimately sticks the landing remains to be seen.
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I promise that next time I review something, it will be a thing I hate.
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Because all of this positivity is honestly making me a little nauseous.