Severance: Season 1 – Monday 7th April 2025

I’m still trying to rinse my free trial of Apple TV before it expires. I got to episode 6 of ‘Bad Monkey’ and stopped midway. A storyline that would have been wrapped up in a single episode of Tom Selleck’s ‘Magnum P.I.’ (from the 80’s) had so far been dragged out to six hours!! Why? Because streaming services need to create hours and hours of content for people to scroll their phones to!! So the only story points occur at the start and end of each episode; the filler is for the audience to stare at their phones.

Because I actually devote 100% of my attention to what I’m watching (in my home cinema set-up), I find this type of storytelling infuriating!

So I stopped watching and decided to watch the number one rated show on Apple, with a massive 8.7 on IMDB!

Unfortunately, Severance also suffered from the same drip-feeding of information that seems to plague every show in the modern era.

Before I got to the season finale, I was about to give up, feeling that the show should be called Contrivance, as that’s all this series is. The writing, especially, just seemed lazy.
I mean, there’s enough to keep you watching, but it was by no means the masterpiece audience reviews would have you believe. For instance, a character makes a decision: they’re going to destroy a piece of information. Ok, so that means the story takes a different direction?

No.

They, later in the same episode, retrieve the information they discarded. So what was the point of discarding it? Just to misdirect the audience for twenty minutes. In the next episode, a character chucks a phone in the bin. Later in that episode, he retrieves the phone from the bin.

The writers tease the possibility of sending the characters in an interesting direction, and then pull the rug from under you. Another example is when (SPOILER) a character supposedly dies at the end of one episode, which provides a good cliff-hanger, only for them to be completely fine in the next episode. As said earlier, movies, TV shows, even the news, is made for an audience that is only partially paying attention.

But just when I lost hope, the final two episodes of Season 1 pulled it out of the bag.

They say that the audience will forgive anything for a good ending, and they are right! The season 1 finale was damn good!

Will I watch Season 2? Probably not. I expect the writers to simply undo everything that happened and return to the status quo. Also, this show reminds me of ‘Lost’ (a show built on J.J. Abram’s infamous ‘Mystery Box’ style of storytelling); meaning they will continue to convolute and contrive, without actually knowing the answer to the mysteries they’re creating.

It can only end in disappointment.