(NOTE: No detailed spoilers follow, it’s an enticement not a review.)
A new technology allows people’s minds to be severed while they are at work, so that their work self does not remember their non-work life, and vice versa. The non-work self takes an elevator down, mid-way through the journey there is a changeover moment, and the next instant that the non-work-self experiences is taking the elevator back up at the end of the day, ready to go home.
(This would get cut by an editor, but since its my newsletter: The changeover is portrayed through use of a “Hitchcock Zoom”, invented by the man himself. It involves panning in on a subject (moving the camera closer to them) while simultaneously zooming the camera out (or vice versa), which keeps the figure in the same place and aspect while distorting the background in a characteristic way. Once you start looking for these, you’ll see them *everywhere*. It’s now a basic part of film vocabulary that basically means “holy crap something is happening”.)
This split-consciousness situation does, of course, leave a rather unfortunate work self whose entire life consists of working a shift, getting on the elevator to leave, and then instantly arriving again in the elevator the next morning in a different outfit—one of the characters aptly refers to this as a form of hell.
What’s so great about SEVERANCE (stream on Apple TV) is that it picks that one sci fi premise and then that’s *it*. Absolutely everything else about the world is rendered in an accurate and expected way. It requires exactly one suspension of disbelief. It just uses that one premise over and over and over to fantastic effect.
I’ve bastardized Brandon Sanderson’s maxim in this space before, and I’m happy to do so again: “The key to writing good premises is to go deep and not broad—pick fewer things and explore them more fully, rather than losing momentum an idea and bringing in a new one to try to change the subject.”
Severance does that beautifully. Its singular premise goes in *so* many different directions and still manages to tie up at the end of its slow-burn first season. The pilot may be the worst episode; it just gets better and better, spinning out a worthy neo-noir plot (memory loss and recovery of course being a noir staple) alongside its fully-deserved sci fi bona fides.
It’s no surprise that the quality is high, since it was created by and about half was directed by Ben Stiller, who is one of the true great artists and geniuses of modern Hollywood. And of course because it’s Ben Stiller the cast is incredible—the underrated Adam Scott stars and his co-stars include Particia Arquette, John Turturro, Christopher Walken, and a diverse cast of talented younger actors in some key and memorable roles. There’s hardly a false acting note among the nine episodes.
Final selling point: This show does something I love where for the most part the next episode picks up right where the last one leaves off, so it’s like you’re watching a really long movie, and it makes it very bingeable. Be careful with it before bed, though, because it gave my wife and I both strange dreams. It’s great but extremely creepy.
I originally wanted this double-reco to have an essayish component where I linked the two shows together thematically and tied them to some larger point about our culture, but after sitting and thinking about it for a while I realized these shows just have nothing to do with each other except that I liked both, and trying to force some profound connection where none exists would be an avoidable case of bad writing.
So in that spirit, the other show you should watch is called WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (Seasons 1-3 streaming on Hulu now, new season drops July 12), and it seeks to answer the burning question: “What if Vampires were mean and stupid, and lived in Staten Island because (according to one of the actual characters) “that is where the boat dropped us off”?
The result is an on-the-dark-side-but-not-dark comedy that’s a little bit Big Lebowski, a little bit Seinfeld, a little bit The Office, and a whole lot of raunchy, curse-filled, riotous fun. It’s co-created by *Oscar-winner* Taika Waititi, my wife’s official celebrity crush (along with Ewan Macgregor), writer and director of the upcoming THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER, and also by Jermaine Clement, the guy with big teeth from FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS who looks a bit like Fred Armisen from SNL.
This show is great for the exact opposite reason that SEVERANCE is great—they just unapologetically pile premise on top of premise without mercy (comedy has a lot more leeway here), and manage to keep so many plates spinning at least pretty well that it’s darn impressive. Things that seem like whole other shows or at least full seasons will be single-episode premises, or even throwaway jokes that later recur and often become huge parts of the show, until at this point there are all kinds of supernatural creatures afoot in the world they’ve built.
The show really remains about its five stars, though. There’s three regular vampires: Nadja—a witch-hating, spitfire vampiress who used to read at night in her ancestral village by the light of a burning donkey. Her husband is Lazlo—curmudgeon and self-styled famous pornographic actor known for his “you wank you way, I’ll wank mine” philosophy. Then of course, there’s Nandor the Relentless, former ruler of the long-since-razed nation of El Canadar, now unable to command so much as his petulant vampire roommates into following basic house rules.
The fourth vampire is Colin Robinson—He’s an *energy* vampire, who instead of drinking blood drinks emotional energy from his victims by boring or angering them. As Colin Robinson himself says in an Office-style confessional moment: “We’re the most common kind of vampire. You probably know at least one of us in your own life.” At one point the vampires all do a genetic test, and Colin Robinson’s comes back “100% White”, which just about sums him up.
And last but certainly not least we have Guillermo de la Cruz, Nandor’s portly familiar, on a decade-long quest to become a vampire that his master keeps finding reasons to thwart. Guillermo is the only remotely competent and focused member of their household, and honestly the only reason they’re not all dead partway into season one. Guillermo is perhaps the most sympathetic and likeable hero put on television in the last decade, and I am genuinely invested in his journey at a level of emotional intensity that ensures I will be anxious leading up to the July 12th debut.
There’s so much incredible television available right now, it’s impossible to watch everything. Heck, I work in the industry and am on the couch with my extremely-pregnant (and courageous and beautiful) wife most nights, and I *still* can’t keep up with it all. But I wanted to bring these two to your attention because they’ve both brought me tremendous joy, and their next-season releases will be appointment viewing for me.
Have a great week, and I will be back next Sunday with another original story!