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Throughout the season, Severance hints at a lack of support for mental health, care arrangements, identity politics, and creative output for its characters, hinting at why they might have chosen severance to begin with. Despite this, the show makes a compelling argument by the season’s close: a complete severance of work from life, and vice versa, is not the way forward. Helly (Britt Lower), the only woman in Mark’s office, stands out as someone for whom this divide might be more interesting and complex luckily, the finale seems to indicate that Helly will have a bigger role in a potential season two. One shortfall of Severance, created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller for the majority of its nine-episode season, is its choice to center a middle-aged white man in this premise - historically, the group that has struggled the least with work-life balance. Severance allows him respite from his grief between the hours of nine and five, while the rest of his time is spent drinking on the couch. In the case of Mark, with whom we spend by far the most time, severance seems like a no-brainer (pardon the pun) after the recent death of his wife. In Severance, it’s not a pandemic that makes people desperate to separate their work lives from their personal lives each person has a unique motivation for opting in.
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Zach Cherry, Britt Lower, John Turturro in ‘Severance’ ©Apple TV/Courtesy Everett Collection. Add to that the fact that many of us have had to take on elder care for at-risk relatives, or worry about their well-being even more than usual.Īs the demarcation between labor and life wore away, many realized they weren’t interested in living to work and quit their jobs, moved to less demanding roles, or looked into flexible working conditions, a trend that has been dubbed “the great resignation.” And while there’s a certain amount of privilege baked into those who have been able to take part in this “great resignation,” the trend points to an inescapable truth in a world grappling with the mass disabling event of COVID-19 and long-COVID: the way we work is going to have to drastically shift. Parents (read: moms) have had to juggle childcare and working from home, with many opting out of the latter due to the sheer difficulty of the paid and unpaid labor balance. Since many of us were asked to work from home on that fateful March 2020 day and have continued to do so for an indeterminate amount of time, work has been a hot-button issue. Severance arrives at the perfect time to capitalize on our anxieties around work after two years of working a few feet from where we ostensibly live, “the great resignation,” and “essential workers” being paid a pittance while risking their lives.