severance

Late-ish to the party I have been watching Severance sporadically over the last few weeks. I am about 3/4 through the first season. I am blogging about this in large part because I've noticed, looking back occasionally through old posts as I do, that certain shows and films have loomed incredibly large in my life at certain times when I really thought that taking them on linked me to the zeitgeist, and then later that zeitgeist was so dead I didn't even remember the show or the film, let alone being so into it. I suppose this is not different, it's just a show, though it's a good one particularly in the sense that it has a tremendous design ethic and so much of it is people walking down nondescript corridors and delivering dialogue to each other in sparse rooms. That gives the concept room to breathe.

There are similarly no weak characters or actors in the series although I feel that in one sense Patricia Arquette, Christopher Walken and John Turturro are kind of wasted, insofar as while they do good competent work here we didn't need famous people to do this work, only to sell the show. But that's OK, it's not my money, it's Apple's, a part of which comes from money I give to Apple to make tv shows for me. 

It is not a difficult show to follow, I assume, though I do also find that every time I finish an ep, and then read the wikipedia summary, there are things I didn't realise that surprise me. I don't have this problem with Homicide by the way. But then there are no wikipedia summaries on Homicide. 

A lot of people talk about Severance being of-the-moment in its exploration of the value of a complete disconnect between work and home life. But seriously, is that an aspiration? Most people, I thought, were more concerned these days with the blurring of the boundaries between the two. Anyway, I am not watching it as though it were social commentary.