A long time ago, hopefully long enough that none of what I’m about to say is still actionable, I spent a few months working for a marketing company, listening to other people’s phone calls. The files arrived on my computer each day from a call centre that pestered people to buy insurance. Often, customers would decide that they didn’t want the insurance, and I would listen to them agreeing to buy it (calls may be recorded for training purposes!) and say if the salesperson had mis-sold the product. If they stayed on script, the customer would be asked to pay for the insurance. If the salesperson had deviated or not read out specific terms, they’d get their money back immediately. I soon realised this job wasn’t real.
It took a few days of listening to calls to understand that the business model involved selling people (almost all of whom were elderly) something they didn’t need, through some fairly pushy chat. One lunchbreak I read the distance selling regulations, which were very clear that the customers were all entitled to a refund anyway. It dawned on me that it didn’t really matter what I thought about a call. I was just there so the company could say that a responsible process was being followed, to delay that process and if necessary to absorb some blame for it. If I’d been an employee I might have argued this point, but I wasn’t. I worked for a temping agency that was helping itself to half my wages. So from that point on, everyone got their money back. Each morning I opened a spreadsheet, gave everyone a refund – like Robin Hood, minus the bravery or integrity – and spent the rest of the day reading sci-fi novels.
I’m fairly confident this wasn’t a crime. If anything, I was ensuring the law was upheld – like a police officer, minus the bravery or integrity – and anyway as I say, the job was a joke.
Over time, a couple of my fellow temps tentatively admitted that they had come to a similar realisation, and they weren’t doing the work either. But we also understood that other people were doing the work, because they were committed and responsible, and to point out that it was all a farce would have been to denigrate their efforts as meaningless.
The problem with the hit US drama Severance is that it does exactly that, but in a way that is meaner and less honest.
The premise of Severance is this: a corporation has developed a way to split people’s memories, so at work they are an entirely different person, with no memories of their life outside the office, and at home they remember nothing of their work. During the first season there’s a scene in which one character records a video message for their “innie” – their work self – in which they tell this newborn offshoot of their personality: “I am a person. You are not.”
That’s the cruel irony of the series, which its producer and director, Ben Stiller, originally envisaged as a comedy. Ben Stiller, a centimillionaire who was born into a wealthy showbusiness family and got his first TV role aged nine, is a person with a fulfilling, creative job, and so are his friends and colleagues. And they’ve made a show about how being a corporate drone is so unfulfilling, so empty of real experience, that in the first episode one character asks if they are in hell.
This joke is repeated again and again. The actors literally move numbers around on old-fashioned screens and say “the work is mysterious and important”, occasionally smirking as they say it. The audience is supposed to smirk with them, because of course office work isn’t important, it’s emasculating and dull and nothing like as interesting as making a TV show that costs twenty million dollars per episode. Look at you all, pressing your stupid buttons, it sneers. What even is data entry? Who knows or cares? Imagine having to do it for a living!
The Office (in all its forms) recognises not only how self-important and silly the beige world can be, but that it contains within it dignity and beauty. Severance is a far more brutal appraisal of corporate work, by people who have apparently never done it. For Hollywood actors, offices are just backgrounds that people spend a short amount of time in before escaping to a more colourful life. No one is supposed to be happy in an office. The series expects us to root for the “innies”, but only because we hope they might be able to become something more than a person who pushes numbers around on a screen. The butt of the joke – if you’re a normal person with an office job – is you.
Severance is of course not just a Ben Stiller production but an Apple TV show. Apple has spent decades promoting the idea that working on a computer can be glamorous and fulfilling. For five years it exhorted its customers to “Think Different”. The way to Think Different was to buy the same components sold by every other tech company, assembled in the same factory in China, in a slightly different box. It is frankly rude for that same company to spend (a reported) $200m depicting knowledge work as the generic and ultimately pointless occupation of people who only half exist. The circle of insult will be complete when AI, in which Apple plans to invest more than half a trillion dollars, makes you redundant, and you sit at your overpriced Apple computer watching expensive Apple shows about how everything you tried to do was futile and darkly amusing.
It would not be credible to argue that Severance is anything other than superbly made. It is beautifully shot and brilliantly acted, and this too is part of the insult, because it is so well made that it keeps the viewer watching, waiting for some plot to happen during hour after hour of exposition. In total the two series come to more than seventeen hours of people walking around a mostly empty office building. The car park alone gets a full series’ worth of eyeball time.
The viewer is made to return again and again, like a beaten dog or a Ryanair passenger, by the idea that at some point something might actually happen, that a plot will emerge and make sense. They are foiled every time and made instead to watch another 45 minutes of backstory. This is a trick learned from series such as Lost, in which viewers spent 121 episodes waiting to find out what really happened and never did. Some viewers would argue that this made Lost a masterpiece of artful, open-to-interpretation TV. Others might argue it was just lazy writing.
This isn’t a story so much as a floating mass of jellyfish tendrils with which the viewer intermittently comes into contact. And the show’s premise is a joke that neither a Hollywood millionaire or a Silicon Valley behemoth have any right to make. It’s a long, long exercise in seeing how long your customers will tolerate being laughed at.
[See also: Why Severance is the series for our times]
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