I woke up standing in front of an easel

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 TV shows of 2025

#6 :  Severance

It had been three long years since we last walked the sterile halls of Lumon Industries, but one frantic sprint through said corridors along with Adam Scott’s Mark S, and it was like we’d never left. Building on the first season’s ‘Macrodat Uprising’ (archly recapped in animated form by Keanu Reeves), Season 2 brought us the inspired Miss Huang (“Why are you a child?”), the Data-Refiners’ first ‘ORTBO’, the goat-loving madness of Mammalians Nurturable, an unforgettable character ‘death’, and the bizarre yet dramatic scene of Mark’s Innie arguing metaphysics with his Outie via camcorder. Puzzle box shows have an unenviable task in needing to pull back the curtain just enough to reveal gradually more of the larger picture, while not quite enough to puncture the mystery. Dan Erickson’s follow-up season manages just that, judging its prestige with dead-eyed accuracy. In Episode 7’s ‘Chikhai Bardo’, we are finally inducted into Lumon’s insidious plan, only to tee up a finale that asks a dozen more questions than it answers, leaving us with that final Graduate-nodding freeze frame. Let the Music Dance Experience commence!

We first met Severance back in '22 and I absolutely loved it - as Empire says, it seemed to take them a long time to get around to the second series. But I obviously watched it at the time - so I did still love it?

As Empire says above, these kind of shows need to "pull back the curtain just enough to reveal gradually more of the larger picture, while not quite enough to puncture the mystery" and there's certainly an argument that they tried to do that here, but I think there's also an argument that they might have overly complicated matters somewhat. Reading the above, they also introduced a load of concepts that I'd completely forgotten about - so what did I remember?

Well, most of the central cast return with some new faces to make us go "huh?" (this happens a lot in this show) - Sarah Bock (as Miss Huang) is the most intriguing of these. Adam Scott and Britt Lower (as Mark & Helly) continue to be the main characters (with a very complicated relationship) but Tramell Tillman (as Milchick) has a much bigger role in this season and he handles the increased responsibility well. So well in far, that he won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series becoming, somewhat incredibly, the first black, gay man to do so, Sorry, I should phrase that as "the first black man and the first openly gay man" to do so - enlightened times, eh? The man's on quite the run though, having appeared in the last Mission Impossible and Spiderman : Brand New Day since.

OK, let's get back to Severance - it's well acted, but does it still look good? Oh boy, does it look good - imho this is one of the best looking things on telly with many of the shots being pure artwork (particularly when they head off on their ORTBO!). There are also very well choreographed shots which feature pure mayhem as well - the Music Dance Experience is really QUITE the experience.

And if I'm going to have any quibbles, it's the general level of mayhem which caused me the biggest problems here - they just throw so much at the screen that it's hard to keep up. And it's hard to know whether you really need to, because there's no way that the plot is going to keep all those details in - and I certainly think that contributed to me struggling to remember large sections of this season.

So, I enjoyed this and I'll certainly watch the next season, but I do have concerns that it's going to make even less sense and be even less easy to follow, so I'm hoping they rein things in a bit - and also include a very long "previously on Severance" recap in the first episode. But, like Pluribus before it, if you like your sci-fi to have any interesting central concept and then just run with it and you've not seen this, then check this out on Apple TV.

#7 - I loved this