At first, “scary numbers” seems ridiculous. Then you realize we live in a world where otherwise meaningless numbers (also known as “money”) are, because of their emotional effects on others, scaling up to the whole society, legitimately fear-inducing.
“The Americans” doesn’t get enough love as one of the top shows of the past decade.
The darkness sneaks up on you. The people who start out seeming like James Bond characters end up carrying the full intolerable weight of their lies and destructive actions. People who looked like side characters are followed up with entire life stories in the shadows.
The Bureau is an even better spy show IMO though I loved both. Something about how low key and realer The Bureau feels makes it more intense. It felt like The Wire to me though completely different shows.
I am enjoying the form and structure but still uncertain about the substance.
I do hope they have a narrative arc planned with a satisfyingly metaphorical conclusion and will not, like certain other shows in a similar genre, meander from one surrealist allegory to another because additional seasons were ordered. The only truly exemplary production I can name in this vein being the sole season of The Prisoner (McGoohan, 1967-68).
> meander from one surrealist allegory to another because additional seasons were ordered
This is how I find many shows made in the last ~20 years, but changing out "from one surrealist allegory to another" for various other things. Heroes, Jericho, Battlestar Galactica, House of Cards, hell even Downton Abbey... I would add the Walking Dead and Game of Thrones but I couldn't get through a season of either. I never saw Lost but I think it's the same kind of thing. I'm going to catch flak for it but I thought the same about Stranger Things.
All of them had a good pilot and/or first season, but then the rest of the seasons.... definitely came afterwards.
I will never forgive Lost (which I originally watched in real time) and almost always wait for shows to conclude now before giving them my time.
Nonetheless, I'm enamored by Severance. The attention to detail by the show runners is amazing[1]. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at[2]. It's downright funny at times. I've re-watched the entire first season and there's so many details I missed the first time through. I will likely be satisfied even if it doesn't answer all its questions, but I have a feeling it will.
[1] BTW, the first eight chapters of The You You Are were released on Apple Books yesterday in both eBook and Audiobook form (read by the author).
[2] I watch in a home theater on a 120" 2.39:1 screen. I love that recent shows are being released in scope (see also Silo).
Honestly, I'm really enjoying that uncertainty and I couldn't image how entertaining it'd be. It certainly has a special place in this current "Zeitgeist" where video games are played by various generations and people calling each other "NPC"s as insult. There's this massive scale of contemporary enterprises, they all would like to retain that image of being young and full of empathy, while also standing above the law. Have you ever talked to some superior at a company and left with this empty feeling that made you recognize all of this unwillingness to change? Severence just hits that spot and frames it nicely into humor, yet still doesn't laugh about it. I question a bit the addition of the latest department in episode 3 and just hope they can stick the landing with such decisions.
> The only truly exemplary production I can name in this vein being the sole season of The Prisoner (McGoohan, 1967-68).
It was really good at building up a mystery over the course of the first season, but I've been a little disappointed in the second so far.
The pacing's become glacial; the first couple of episodes worked mostly to undercut the dramatic significance of the events of last season's finale.
And I feel like the way that the satire is slowly being replaced by self-serious "lore" is hurting the show; it was very funny and disturbing to see the way the innies are "raised" in a cult and view the CEO as a kind of Messiah (and observe the parallels to real-world corporate culture); Lumen really being an evil cult - as opposed to just an evil company - in "reality", feels less satirical and more ham-fisted.
The ending of the most recent episode suggests promising things to come at least.
Patriot is indeed criminally underrated. I knew about "pipe speak" [1] before the show [2]. But it turned my partner on to it, and so we speak a lot in it to this day for fun.
One of the best things I've ever seen and I watch quite a lot of TV and film. I'm really only making this comment so that a passerby will see this abundant confluence of support for the show and decide to try it out on a whim. Just a fantastic absurdist, surrealist comedy that's also well-acted and well-written.
Yes! I think the name put a lot of people off, but it’s super good. Really makes you appreciate breakfast and the integral principles of the structural dynamics of flow as a nice bonus.
Same for me. Severance is probably the best show of last decade. The last time I had such an engrossing experience was while reading 1984.
My other two are:
- Shogun (The depiction of 1600s Japan is so real)
- Resident Alien (Funny and heartwarming to see an Alien getting accustomed to life on Earth dealing with complex human relationships with their flaws)
PS: I am sad to exclude Parks and Recreation which ran from 2009-2015 so probably considered outside of last decade.
Interesting. I thought the premise had potential, but found the writing unbearable. There were major plot holes in the universe they created withing the first 10 minutes. It just didn't make sense. The dialogues and acting was bad on top of that. Didn't even finish the first episode. That being said, the series has OK ratings and was renewed several times, so it might be me not giving it a fair chance.
I found Shogun the show to be relatively disappointing, after having read the book before. The book has a lot of nuanced explanations of people's motivations and philosophical/intelligent dialogue that the show just skips over, since they wanted to cover a huge tome in just one season.
This series deserved to be 2X longer to cover those imho.
Agreed. I think "The Americans" is still at the top of my list for the last decade then it's a tossup between "The Leftovers", "Severance" and "Mr. Robot".
Edit: I forgot "Andor". Easily the best Star Wars thing since the original 3. I like how it shows the hubris and infighting of The Empire and how that leaves openings for the resistance. Feels like a very real look into the workings of an authoritarian regime.
Americans is great-- a little uneven because there is a lot more of it then say, Patriot, but also a typically underrated show. Superb cast (they were actually married) and a great take on the material. They could have made them goodie two shoes who subverted their mission; they could have made them sinister spies. Instead they made them people.
"Or perhaps you find my politics a bit strong for your taste?" was some of the best television I had ever seen in my life, easily up there with the best lines from Breaking Bad or Anthony Hopkins' monologues in West World. The build-up to that moment was masterfully done. I got goosebumps at that crescendo.
Mr. Robot had one of the craziest endings I have ever seen in a show. I'll admit I had a tough time watching it around S2 because so much was unexplained, and I felt like I was going insane.
So glad I stuck it out though, I still think about it.
I’m routinely pulled out of it for a moment to appreciate how genuinely interesting and thought-provoking the writing is compared to what I’ve been seeing for years now.
Maybe I watch the wrong stuff, but I’m glad I gave this a chance. It’s so fun.
I'd add in The Bridge - original Swedish version with subtitles - is another of my favorite shows. The Nordic Noir genre has mix of intellectualism and misanthropy that I love in shows (including Severance).
I enjoy shows where I get completely engrossed in the world and the story. I love shows that I can fall in love with again on a rewatch. And I want to have lingering thoughts about it when it’s over.
True Detective S1 (2014) is perfect television, but is too old for the last-decade list.
Definitely The Americans as mentioned above, also The Expanse, The Man in the High Castle, Slow Horses (especially the panoramic London drone shots), Preacher (in which both Tom Cruise and a sewage treatment methane reactor violently explode for their own independent reasons), Babylon 5 (relaxing the last decade constraint), LEXX (a soft porn space opera), Farscape (with real MUPPETS!!!), A&E Network's "A Nero Wolfe Mystery" (with Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe, who was also just as grumpy in War Games), and Wilfred (both the original rough edgy low budget original Australian version, and the well produced clean cut American version with Elijah Woods).
Also anything with Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale, who was Claudia the KGB handler who liked playing PacMan in The Americans, Mags Bennett the ruthless head of the marijuana and moonshine smuggling clan in Justified, a fictionalized (or was it???) version of herself "Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale" in Bojack Horseman, records supervisor Camilla Figg in Dexter, and Ranger Liz in Cocaine Bear ("I'm sorry. Where'd the bear go?"), and a Canadian maple syrup smuggler in The Sticky. Such a wide range and prodigious rap sheet!
The Complete Margo Martindale Timeline | BoJack Horseman
Working at a startup before product-market fit can feel like this.
You don’t know why the work is important, but it must be done so we can at least discover whether it was important. You may not get that information, but you can take comfort in assuming someone does have it.
You’re mostly disconnected from your previous life.
There is a guy in the next office feeding baby goats, and your reaction is: “Yes, it makes sense that we’re also exploring feeding baby goats.”
People come in as blank slates and you’re grateful to have their companionship in the shared madness.
I find this more likely in a large corporation. In my experience, in a startup I know what we're trying to accomplish even if I don't know how we're going to do it, yet. I have a lot of control in a startup and I'm wearing a lot of hats which gives me visibility into how things are going.
By contrast, in a corporation you're handed a small piece of the puzzle and you're not sure how it's important or if it's really necessary and you're reliant on others in far flung parts of the company to relay how things are going.
I kind of think that people who haven't worked in a large corporation probably don't get Severance on a visceral level like those of us who have do.
Startups can be as siloed and prone to messianic cults of personality as large corporations do. It would be themed differently from Severance, sure, but there are other shows that tackle that.
That’s funny because I thought they captured it perfectly. Cults can be blissful places; the experience and friends I’ve made amidst the madness I’ve experienced in startups made me stronger in the end.
Yeah, to me the show was much more about how every modern real company secretly wished they could sever their employees, and how much they'd abuse that power dynamic if they actually had it.
Are there any fan theories of what the work is they’re doing?
My bet is on lumen “renting” part of their subconscious to train a computer, while their conscious minds see a sort of projection of the training, and the act of selecting the numbers has a mirror effect on the part of the brain they’re renting, affecting the model training. But that may be a little too “current events” focused, and the writers may have something totally different in mind.
My theory is kind of the inverse. Their technology has the ability to "take over" the mind and implant a new personality but maybe at the current level it's unsophisticated and all they can do is make a "clean slate" of a person with some basic motor, language and other socialization skills.
"The work" is then not about training a computer model but seeing if they can induce a reaction into a person. That is, they're trying to refine their mind control program.
The characters talk about feeling things when they group numbers for binning. So the task is about refining their projection system, to induce a particular emotion or reaction, in a controlled way, over and over to dial in the technology.
From season 1, there's lore of MDR going crazy and killing a neighboring group. This could be when their experimentation malfunctioned or was too sloppy in some way and induced a killing frenzy.
I have no idea what "cold harbor" is though, or why Mark S. is so special among the other innies.
Agreed with your theory overall, but wasn’t that lore of “MDR going crazy and killing a neighboring group” revealed in s1 to be fabricated entirely, with each group having their own version of that lore against other groups? E.g., the optics and design group had the exact opposite version of the lore as MDR, down to paintings depicting the events being the exact same, but with swapped badge colors that indicated the aggressor.
My theory is that all the severed employees are doing various maintenance tasks to keep the floor functioning. Like the hospital in Yes, Minister that is closed to the public but has 500 employees, all of them overworked.[1]
Take O&D for instance, their full time job appears to be to just create art and handbooks used on the severed floor. Perhaps all the departments are like that. MDR could be doing some sort of ongoing maintenance for the severed system itself, like emotion or memory control of the employees on the floor.
I believe the "point" of the severed floor is not the actual work that's being done, but the act of keeping them occupied while they are experimented on. Besides Mark S and Cold Harbor, I believe there are hints of other experiments being run. The dreams Irving B has during work seem unique to him, and it's uniquely affecting his outie as well. I also believe recent events in Season 2 with Dylan G could be the start of another experiment.
I thought the wife was oddly emotional during that scene with Dylan G. While I agree it would be odd to see your SO's innie, the way she was in awe and full of emotion just seemed very intense. Like seeing a long lost lover or those first date jitters. Probably overthinking things but I thought it was odd.
My hunch is that Lumon is working on trying to transfer minds into new bodies and/or bring deceased people back to life, namely for the immortality of the founder. I think the MDR numbers stuff is somehow related to getting severed individuals to map memories somehow, hence their association with different feelings.
This is also my running theory. Cult-like structure focused on elongating legacies via body replacements and consciousness transfer - MDR being a testbed or something for emotional stability and processing or something of the sort.
It's been suggested that Mark S is adjusting the neural nets for a robot replacement of his wife. This supported by a few MDR UI screenshots showing acronyms that reference Kier's 4 fundamental tempers: Woe, Frolick, Malice and Dread.
My opinion is that the work they are performing it's not the point of them being there. It's about testing the limits of the exploitations of human beings.
Best I can figure is that it's some form of cryptography. The "severed" thing would be to compartmentalize even more what the underlying work is, the outties are clueless, but even the innies don't get to know what they do because the work is encrypted. They're able to perform it because another part of their brain is severed even more, and just performs the raw algorithm work of decrypting/sorting.
But the rest of Lumen just seems like some bizarro "there's a spaceship hiding in the tail of the comet" cult.
They’re sorting people according to the four tempers of Eagan - woe, frolic, dread and malice. The buttons are labelled accordingly, using two letters on the show but one letter here.
I had to explain to the missus — who’s never worked in a large enterprise — that the environs of Lumon and the apparently pointless and meaningless work is entirely realistic. She didn’t believe me.
She never had to “massage the numbers” to make them less scary to someone in management.
Readit News
Would you be inclined to use a nickname?
P.S. The numbers are scary.
The work is mysterious, and important.
Season 2 is going now. It’s one of my top 3 shows of the last decade, highly recommend it.
The darkness sneaks up on you. The people who start out seeming like James Bond characters end up carrying the full intolerable weight of their lies and destructive actions. People who looked like side characters are followed up with entire life stories in the shadows.
I do hope they have a narrative arc planned with a satisfyingly metaphorical conclusion and will not, like certain other shows in a similar genre, meander from one surrealist allegory to another because additional seasons were ordered. The only truly exemplary production I can name in this vein being the sole season of The Prisoner (McGoohan, 1967-68).
Be seeing you
https://torontosun.com/entertainment/television/severance-cr...
We'll see how that goes.
This is how I find many shows made in the last ~20 years, but changing out "from one surrealist allegory to another" for various other things. Heroes, Jericho, Battlestar Galactica, House of Cards, hell even Downton Abbey... I would add the Walking Dead and Game of Thrones but I couldn't get through a season of either. I never saw Lost but I think it's the same kind of thing. I'm going to catch flak for it but I thought the same about Stranger Things.
All of them had a good pilot and/or first season, but then the rest of the seasons.... definitely came afterwards.
I will never forgive Lost (which I originally watched in real time) and almost always wait for shows to conclude now before giving them my time.
Nonetheless, I'm enamored by Severance. The attention to detail by the show runners is amazing[1]. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at[2]. It's downright funny at times. I've re-watched the entire first season and there's so many details I missed the first time through. I will likely be satisfied even if it doesn't answer all its questions, but I have a feeling it will.
[1] BTW, the first eight chapters of The You You Are were released on Apple Books yesterday in both eBook and Audiobook form (read by the author).
[2] I watch in a home theater on a 120" 2.39:1 screen. I love that recent shows are being released in scope (see also Silo).
Honestly, I'm really enjoying that uncertainty and I couldn't image how entertaining it'd be. It certainly has a special place in this current "Zeitgeist" where video games are played by various generations and people calling each other "NPC"s as insult. There's this massive scale of contemporary enterprises, they all would like to retain that image of being young and full of empathy, while also standing above the law. Have you ever talked to some superior at a company and left with this empty feeling that made you recognize all of this unwillingness to change? Severence just hits that spot and frames it nicely into humor, yet still doesn't laugh about it. I question a bit the addition of the latest department in episode 3 and just hope they can stick the landing with such decisions.
> The only truly exemplary production I can name in this vein being the sole season of The Prisoner (McGoohan, 1967-68).
I definitely see Twin Peaks in the same realm.
It was really good at building up a mystery over the course of the first season, but I've been a little disappointed in the second so far.
The pacing's become glacial; the first couple of episodes worked mostly to undercut the dramatic significance of the events of last season's finale.
And I feel like the way that the satire is slowly being replaced by self-serious "lore" is hurting the show; it was very funny and disturbing to see the way the innies are "raised" in a cult and view the CEO as a kind of Messiah (and observe the parallels to real-world corporate culture); Lumen really being an evil cult - as opposed to just an evil company - in "reality", feels less satirical and more ham-fisted.
The ending of the most recent episode suggests promising things to come at least.
As a satire of office work, that would kind of track; a version of Parkinson’s Law.
Criminally underrated. If you enjoy older Guy Ritchie films or In Bruges, do yourself a favor and watch it.
Also thematically similar, re: alienation and disassociation!
I hated the first few episodes but I think it might now be the finest show I've ever seen (and I've seen all those mentioned here).
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HML8PMPeFkg [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator
Seriously though, couldn't agree more. Criminally underrated indeed!
The same crew made another show and I couldn’t get past 2 episodes.
Patriot was really a celestial event in the world of TV
My other two are:
- Shogun (The depiction of 1600s Japan is so real)
- Resident Alien (Funny and heartwarming to see an Alien getting accustomed to life on Earth dealing with complex human relationships with their flaws)
PS: I am sad to exclude Parks and Recreation which ran from 2009-2015 so probably considered outside of last decade.
(That, by the way, is where Severance seemingly got the inspiration for "The Board")
Interesting. I thought the premise had potential, but found the writing unbearable. There were major plot holes in the universe they created withing the first 10 minutes. It just didn't make sense. The dialogues and acting was bad on top of that. Didn't even finish the first episode. That being said, the series has OK ratings and was renewed several times, so it might be me not giving it a fair chance.
This series deserved to be 2X longer to cover those imho.
Both my two favorite shows of the last few years are on it - Severance and Silo
Edit: I forgot "Andor". Easily the best Star Wars thing since the original 3. I like how it shows the hubris and infighting of The Empire and how that leaves openings for the resistance. Feels like a very real look into the workings of an authoritarian regime.
So glad I stuck it out though, I still think about it.
Maybe I watch the wrong stuff, but I’m glad I gave this a chance. It’s so fun.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1733785/
Severance could well get into my top 3, but currently I think mine would be: Mr. Robot, Breaking Bad and Wednesday.
True Detective S1 (2014) is perfect television, but is too old for the last-decade list.
The only other definitive Top 3 is Dark (Netflix)
Other candidates:
- Frieren
- Better Call Saul
- Arcane
- Midnight Mass
- Counterpart (underrated)
- Andor
Also anything with Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale, who was Claudia the KGB handler who liked playing PacMan in The Americans, Mags Bennett the ruthless head of the marijuana and moonshine smuggling clan in Justified, a fictionalized (or was it???) version of herself "Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale" in Bojack Horseman, records supervisor Camilla Figg in Dexter, and Ranger Liz in Cocaine Bear ("I'm sorry. Where'd the bear go?"), and a Canadian maple syrup smuggler in The Sticky. Such a wide range and prodigious rap sheet!
The Complete Margo Martindale Timeline | BoJack Horseman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX1zXzz8xVw
Incorporated (Damon & Affleck), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series)
Peripheral (Nolan), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series)
Zoo (James Patterson), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_(American_TV_series)
Deleted Comment
You don’t know why the work is important, but it must be done so we can at least discover whether it was important. You may not get that information, but you can take comfort in assuming someone does have it.
You’re mostly disconnected from your previous life.
There is a guy in the next office feeding baby goats, and your reaction is: “Yes, it makes sense that we’re also exploring feeding baby goats.”
People come in as blank slates and you’re grateful to have their companionship in the shared madness.
By contrast, in a corporation you're handed a small piece of the puzzle and you're not sure how it's important or if it's really necessary and you're reliant on others in far flung parts of the company to relay how things are going.
I kind of think that people who haven't worked in a large corporation probably don't get Severance on a visceral level like those of us who have do.
Come in, go home, come back. Did something actually happen that wasn’t work? Unclear.
Work without workers? Perfect!
Looks like it's not an official thing, it's a fan project: https://twitter.com/shiffman/status/1512075150857965574 - here's the YouTube video (2h52m from a livestream) where Daniel Shiffman introduces it, at about 34m in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vmcm25cSTU - then talks through how it works.
"This website is not affiliated with Apple, Endeavor Content, Red Hour Films, or anything else remotely official. It’s made by a dude in Kentucky."
https://github.com/Lumon-Industries/Macrodata-Refinement
My bet is on lumen “renting” part of their subconscious to train a computer, while their conscious minds see a sort of projection of the training, and the act of selecting the numbers has a mirror effect on the part of the brain they’re renting, affecting the model training. But that may be a little too “current events” focused, and the writers may have something totally different in mind.
"The work" is then not about training a computer model but seeing if they can induce a reaction into a person. That is, they're trying to refine their mind control program.
The characters talk about feeling things when they group numbers for binning. So the task is about refining their projection system, to induce a particular emotion or reaction, in a controlled way, over and over to dial in the technology.
From season 1, there's lore of MDR going crazy and killing a neighboring group. This could be when their experimentation malfunctioned or was too sloppy in some way and induced a killing frenzy.
I have no idea what "cold harbor" is though, or why Mark S. is so special among the other innies.
Take O&D for instance, their full time job appears to be to just create art and handbooks used on the severed floor. Perhaps all the departments are like that. MDR could be doing some sort of ongoing maintenance for the severed system itself, like emotion or memory control of the employees on the floor.
I believe the "point" of the severed floor is not the actual work that's being done, but the act of keeping them occupied while they are experimented on. Besides Mark S and Cold Harbor, I believe there are hints of other experiments being run. The dreams Irving B has during work seem unique to him, and it's uniquely affecting his outie as well. I also believe recent events in Season 2 with Dylan G could be the start of another experiment.
^1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww
The whole concept of the show is artificial amnesia, so what if the concept is induced amnesia to solve for it?
But the rest of Lumen just seems like some bizarro "there's a spaceship hiding in the tail of the comet" cult.
I also believe the people in R&D help with refinement by inducing objects into the consciousness and testing the output via 3D printing.
Perhaps MDR works on the emotional side, while R&D works on the imagination or construction of thoughts.
Also, one of the rabbit holes for a bunch of the theories is the Lexington Letter, which you can find in Apple Books or wikis/PDFs.
(Season One predates the LLM bubble, so almost certainly not.)
She never had to “massage the numbers” to make them less scary to someone in management.