Hacker Cinema
Severance
2022 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Dan Erickson
DramaMysteryScience FictionFantasy
Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives. When a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs.
82 positive11 negative4 mixed39 neutralfrom 136 commenters
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146 comments on Hacker News
Severance is a truly amazing tv show
This is actually the plot of the hit TV show Severance.
That email chain sounds exactly like the TV show Severance
> streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there
True, but it's way less common to want to listen to a specific piece of music than it is to want to watch a specific film or TV series. There's also way way way more music out there than there is film or TV, so it's again less of a problem.
If I want to listen to music I just say "hey google play some music" and it gets some random music based on my tastes that is generally pretty good. I rarely say "hey google play this specific track". Generally when I'm educating my kids ("It's cooooming home, it's coming, England's coming home").
For film and TV there's really not that much good stuff out there. I hear about a specific series, say Severance. Oh it's only available on Apple TV and I only have Netflix, Disney+ and Prime. Piracy it is then!
> I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context
Cold Harbor is a reference to the TV show Severance.
Without going into any real spoilers it was the code name of a data classification project so mysterious that the people working on it weren't allowed to know what they were working on (and yes, the project in the show was probably named after the battle in the Civil War).
The Meta connection is that there are some humorous parallels between that project and a project involving people tagging data to train technology to replace themselves, and just the overall creepy dystopian vibe of both the fictional and real-world companies (and founders) involved.
Wait a sec. Windows 2000 was probably their best operating system. Windows ME was absolutely their worst. They were so different I’m not sure the entire company wasn’t swapped into the set of Severance (tv show) or something of that ilk.
Disney can do whatever it wants if it restores and releases a 4K version of the theatrical cuts of the original trilogy, something the fan base has wanted for decades at this point. I won't hold my breath.
Very large companies are generally very bad at consistently producing original content because everything in a corporat eenvironment skews towards not taking any risks. Big companies want a repeatable formula. It's why we get to many sequels and reboots with depressingly few new properties. HBO has been the exception to the rule. I would've also said Apple TV tends to corporatize content into being inoffensive. Modern Family (even though it wasn't an Apple production) is kind of like the perfect Apple TV content. But we have things like Severance and Silo so maybe there's hope.
Anyway, the retconning and corporatization around Star Wars has been depressing to watch. The whole "Han shot first" was a line in the sand more than 30 years old that seemed to stem from George Lucas's desire for a lighter classification for the films. The Phantom Menace of course was very much aimed at a younger audience even though the plot revolved around a tax treaty dispute of all things.
The sequel trilogy was for me, as an original Star Wars fan, deeply depressing. I honestly haven't even watched the last one where Carrie Fisher did her best Mary Poppins. And honestly the whole prmise of midichlorians (from the original trilogy) and inheritance of Force ability was really offensive and against the original spirit of Star Wars. I mean as anyone example of corporatization the name "Rey" was chosen to be easily pronounceable in many languages.
Look where we started. The inspiration for Star Wars was the Viet Cong resisting American imperialism in Vietnam (direct from George Lucas) [1].
Disney produced beloved classics like The Jungle Book, Aladdin and Snow White. In the 2000s, they seemed unable to continue this creativity and it became an amalgam of Pixar and the MCU (and later Lucasfilm). Pixar was a culturally antiestablishmment company started by Steve Jobs (yes, yes, he bought a London computer graphics division). The MCU took decades of creativity in the superhero space and basically turned into 2000s era patriotic films. You can guess why the timing.
Oh it's worth adding the Star Wars originally had an expanded universe that was kinda managed by Lucasfilm. Disney abandoned this on purchasing Lucasfilm and some fans were very upset. This included Chewbacca having a wife and family back home. It was all fan fiction, basically.
Disney could very much use the Star Wars milieu to tell stories relevant to our times. The 2025 Superman movie did this for example. and it made some people very upset. But Disney absolutely will not do that. So I really don't think it matters what they try and do.
[1]: https://screenrant.com/star-wars-george-lucas-vietnam-war-inspiration-explainer/
My backlog is crazy long. As much as I love TV I don't get nearly as much time to watch it as I'd like.
* Andor * Black Rabbit * Dune * Last of Us * Percy Mason * The Paper * Pluribus * Severance * The Studio * Succession * White Lotus
Of all those, Andor was the biggest surprise. I'm a mild Star Wars fan (I've seen the movies and that's about it) but I really enjoyed this, probably more than the movies. It looked amazing, was well written and acted. It's a prequel to one of the movies and we watched the movie right after we finished the series and I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
Could be mistaken but isn’t that building used for the Severance tv show?
> versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with
I disagree with this take quite a bit. Yes, software could be better, but Apple TV+ has given dozens of shows the budget and freedom to produce some truly generation-defining art. Ted Lasso, Severance, and For All Mankind are huge stand-outs in their scope, depth, and ambition. For instance, the latter is produced by Sony, yet you see nearly zero product placement, which has been a hallmark of the studio for over a decade now. Putting gobs of money into storytelling yields purer, and therefore more compelling, narratives that will hold up well over time and represent the best of what we are capable of. At the same time, Apple TV+ as a subscription service is also a very convenient way for Apple to weather any ups and downs in the physical product categories.
I’ve seen most of those. Slow horses is phenomenal no notes. for all mankind would be as well if not for the low grade melodrama of the middle seasons, but all the space stuff is amazing. silo is good fun but like severance we’ve gotten two short seasons in how many years? shrinking started out great but did a speedrun in one season of what normally takes jenji kohan three. Foundation has decent highs especially with the dynasty and invictus in season two, but the lows are loooww. And of course severance might even be a masterpiece.
But my point wasn’t that they don’t make good television because they do, it’s that their shows aren’t talked about nearly as much in the mainstream because people don’t have Apple tv. I think Ted lasso and to a lesser degree severance are really their only major popular hits. Most people I talk to haven’t seen slow horses. If it were on Netflix it would be the opposite.
Short film: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363133
My mission was to create a Sci-fi Noir episode of the Twilight Zone by way of David Lynch and Phillip K. Dick. Big shout out to Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller for speaking to my soul in Severance. And of course to the enigmatic QNTM for sparking my imagination with the original story, "We Need to Talk About 55". Long live the SCP Foundation.
I kind of have this, and part of this I think is just cognitive load. When something first comes out. There’s this like added mental pressure to like it, to think about how everyone else responds to it. I watched the Pitt because I already had language for it. I loved ER, and it’s basically a spiritual sequel to the 90’s show. I tried Severance, I don’t know if I would like it a few years from now but I think it would be easier to like without the feeling I was supposed to.
This is a bit overstated but I’m analyzing something mildly subconscious, not like a conscious anxiety - it just feels like a lot of work to engage. A few years later the pressure is off, there’s no expectations. You can choose what to engage with in peace.
There’s also in some cases the obvious - if you don’t like Sinners society implies you’re probably close minded and maybe even a little bit racist. And even if I don’t 100% reject that sentiment, I don’t want to consume art in that context, and I doubt the artist would want me to either(I mean aside from wanting the ticket sales) Better to wait a few years and consume it on your own terms. Have some space to look at the landscape and determine what you might really enjoy in the strength of the idea itself. Most of my favorite shows and movies I consumed in that context.
I don't understand who uses that network anymore. Everytime I login it's all ai generated stories next to ai generated flavor images of people sounding like a parody of themselves ("what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling").
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
I pretty much declared streaming show bankruptcy after sitting through Severance season 2 last year.
I know a lot of people liked it and maybe I'm just cynical, but to me it seems like every "serious" streaming show eventually falls victim to the "stretch a 2 hour movie's plot across a 12 - 16 hour season" strategy. They know it works because enough people binge watch or feel compelled to finish a series they've started.
At this point, if I'm watching a show then it's something where the episodes are sufficiently satisfying self-contained stories (e.g. something like Star Trek, X-Files, sitcoms). If I want something with a more involved plot, then I'll watch a movie. These formats are better because the limited runtime requires the creators to be intentional about what they dedicate screen time to. Meanwhile in a modern "story-driven" streamslop show it's painfully obvious when they're just padding out the runtime with fluff to make it to 8 episodes.
Of course there are exceptions to this, and there are stories for which a miniseries or a long-form series is the ideal video medium to convey them. But what happens so often is that you get 1-2 seasons of compelling storytelling followed by N more mediocre seasons that keep getting made because enough people keep watching. And the latter are just not worth the time investment.
Severance (Apple TV) and Fallout (Amazon Prime) are pretty amazing TV shows that came out somewhat recently. Nothing on top of my mind came out of Netflix for which I really felt the need of resubscribing.
I miss the quality of TV shows we reached with Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Utopia (UK), and Westworld :(
Does anyone else see an echo of Severance (Apple TV series) here?
I loved season 1. Season 2 I thought was great, but to me they opened much more new story than they resolved. I worry season 3 will be much of the same, especially if they’re saying season 4 is basically a certainty. I think severance could have been 2-3 seasons.
you might enjoy the tv series Severance.
On a more serious note, i personally enjoy it. Why? I find software engineering intellectually stimulating and i enjoy the _process_, but i don’t (usually) enjoy the _people_. There are really only a couple former colleagues I actually keep in touch with. You know - the “real” friends so to speak.
My outside-of-work friends are not nerdy like myself and that’s why i love them. Keeps me out of my work bubble and also gives me interesting things to do and talk about on the weekends. :)
Everyone is different though. Some people genuinely enjoy going to the pub with their work mates lol. I’d rather do anything else.
I noticed the same with Severance (also Apple TV). After every episode, there is a short director commentary/crew interviews about random episode specifics.
I liked it quite a bit.
Jumping on to agree with Severance and make a few more.
Silicon Valley - for me the funniest (and painful to watch, sometimes) to show. Schitt’s Creek - heart warming, wonderfully written, very funny bite size episodes perfect for cosy Christmas times.
Folks who have some extra time this Christmas, do check out the tv show Pluribus on Apple TV. It’s not your typical action packed sci-fi show but is very slow burning, philosophical kind of show which I found very smart.
Turns out my best 2 tv shows of last couple of years are on Apple TV: Severance and Pluribus
Ah, good point on Severance; that is a proper example. That there is no unnecessary nudity probably helps the story. Old HBO would have had shower scenes and hook ups interspersed throughout. That might not have hurt, but I don't see the need for it in that show at all.
If you'll excuse my rant; certain tenors of violence and styles of humor are the trend I think that makes things childish. You see the one liners and plot points of marvel movies echoed in some of HBO's high profile shows now. Rebel Moon is, with your criticisms, the type of movie/show the other streaming services have been too eager to make imo. Adult in childish ways, and absent a seriousness in the way it expresses serious plot points.
Hope you're having a good one
Apple seems to have a no-nudity policy more or less (or at least, minimal nudity).
I dunno. Sex is part of human existence so it shouldn’t be off-limits for media IMO. But the sort of perfunctory thing where every show on Netflix or HBO has to have some nudity in the first couple episodes was a bit annoying. I don’t mind the lack of nudity in Apple’s stuff. There’s a balance that Apple falls on the “overly conservative” side of, though.
What’s adult mean to you? Nudity, violence, I dunno. Severance considers things like self-identity and the fake personalities, and fake social constructs of our workplaces… it seems more adult to me than a gangster or cowboy story.
I also quite like Pluribus, it feels like actual sci-fi (in the same way 3 Body Problem from Netflix does, actually—legit sci-fi, not action heroes in space).
IINA on Mac, free & open source, has been perfect for everything for years:
https://github.com/iina/iina
While traveling I was so pissed with the Apple TV player's performance on less-than-lightspeed internet connections, I ragecancelled my subscription and just yo ho ho'ed the last couple episodes of Severance
Yeah, not sure what the author was thinking there. Definitely not 'reaffirming of both your and their humanity'.
I mean, I get that it's supposed to be just a general pointer or something, but that phrase is word for word what an LLM would say when it's self censoring... Or something lifted out of an episode of Severance.
I think you've got it backwards.
That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's.
There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads.
It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, or Andor on Disney+, or White Lotus on HBO, or Severance on Apple TV+, or even something like Alien: Earth currently on FX/Hulu.
You might want to find better places for watching TV...
I guess I wasn't thinking "series", but "films".
I know I have a lot of series to catch up on (although from the above, I found Severance disappointing, oh well).
I had another thought on this that might be where the disconnect is. When I say it adds value, I'm not saying equivalent value. AI generated Shakespeare or Star Trek etc wouldn't (likely) be the same value as the originals, but they add some value, even if that value is just a couple hours of entertainment for a single individual. Part of the beauty of AI is the empowerment it will give to the individual that previously required huge amounts of investment and work by professionals, which necessitated that films/books/etc be widely marketable and economical. Even consider the difference between 1930s films and films today where originally it was "mass appeal to all audiences" but now there is a ton of variety for all sorts of different tastes. When AI gets to the point it can produce stuff people actually want to watch, the potential for hyper customization is huge. I don't think that will eliminate broadly appealing productions as we humans still love to share and talk about what we watched, and jump on bandwagons for the shared culture (Severance being a good example haha), but it will add more arrows to our quivers.
If they do, I’m considering Severance a documentary.
Microsoft, Google, or Amazon don't t care about your fintech code. Other fintechs do.
The threat isn't your cloud provider stealing your code, it's your own staff walking out the door with it and either starting their own firm or giving it to a competitor in exchange for a "job" at 2x their previous salary.
I've seen very high security fintech setups first-hand and I've got friends in the industry, including a friend that simply memorised the core algorithms, walked out, rewrote it from scratch in a few years and is making bank right now.
PS: The TV show Severance is the wet dream of many fintech managers.
I get strong "Severance" (a TV series by Apple) vibes from this story.
An employee being manipulated into loyalty and servitude through guilt. This seems fucked up...
Severance quietly covers the topic. The conversations in season 1 on the Macrodata refinement uprisings and that big painting of the event come to mind.
Severance was a good TV show but now everyone is trying to sound like Mr Mikcheck
We use Apple TV a small amount (for Silo and Severance most recently), and Disney+ slightly more for the kids. We occasionally use YouTube.
We got a promotion for Disney+ and probably won't renew it. By the time it's over, it seems like there won't be much worth watching left on there. The kids already have a hard time finding anything they're interested in watching.
It's funny, I instantly recognized that iconic atrium when they used it in Severance and my poor wife had to suffer through an explanation of the history of Bell Labs when she was just trying to watch her TV show.
Alternatively - and now that I'm thinking about it - I think Apple TV might adopt the A/24 model of purchasing individual movies and shows that they like, and marketing it like crazy.
In fact, that does seem to be Apple TV's model already. For example, Ted Lasso, Mythic Quest, Pachinko, Foundation, Silo, Severance, The Studio, and For All Mankind are all produced by entirely different production houses but licensing for them was acquired by Apple.
The storage requirements are still massive. I would guess the raw footage for something like severance (and they probably shoot in at least 4k) is going to be in the area of a petabyte for the entire season.
Even today it's not close to practical to have an entire episode's worth of raw footage (of which there'll be many many takes, many many angles) entirely on an editor's workstation.
The surprising aspect is that they don't use proxies for editing rather than remote desktop.
Interesting, but this misses perhaps the most embarrassing part: They're using Avid and not FCP.
I also don't buy the author's rationale for remote editing; it's oddly archaic: "high-end video production is quite storage-intensive, which is why your favorite YouTuber constantly talks about their editing rigs and network-attached storage. By putting this stuff offsite, they can put all this data on a real server."
Storage is cheap now, and desktop computers are more than powerful enough for any video editing. Any supposed advantage of remote "real servers" is going to be squandered by having to send everything over the Internet. The primary benefit of remote editing (and the much-hyped "camera to cloud") is fast turnaround, which you need for stuff like reality TV and news. But a dramatic series like Severance?
It is pretty baffling that Apple would create a PR vehicle that impugns its products like this. It would be better to say nothing. After Apple acquired Shake, they splashed Lord of the Rings, King Kong, and other major tentpoles on the Apple homepage at every opportunity... of course not mentioning that Weta was rendering those movies on hundreds of Linux servers instead of Macs. But at least Shake was the same product across all platforms, and it really was the primary effects tool on all those movies.
"they do not mention the use of Jump Desktop, which seems like a missed opportunity to promote a small-scale Mac developer. C’mon Apple, do better.)
Oh boy, this is just a minor infraction in Apple's history of disrespect toward developers. They do this, and worse, to major development partners too. I'm not going to name names, but after one such partner funded the acquisition of material on its own equipment and that material was used in a major product keynote... Apple not only neglected to credit or even mention that partner, but proceeded to show the name of a totally uninvolved competitor in its first slide afterward. The level of betrayal there was shocking.
Television today consists of a few bangers like Severance mixed with an awful lot of slop. Serialized or not, it's telling that the term Netflix coined for most of its output is "second-screen content", meaning stuff you have on in the background while you scroll your phone. I had been rewatching Max Headroom recently, and the difference it makes when you make a television show to be watched -- as most television was in the 80s and 90s -- vs. simply filling time, really struck me.
This is for the TV show Severance I believe, which I’ve not seen.
I watched season 1 of severance. What did I miss? I don't remember any lessons on class consciousness
Class consciousness is firmly in the zeitgeist: witness season 1 of Severance.
There is no going back from this, as once you are disillusioned it is much harder to be re-illusioned. There will be some sort of collective response by white-collar professionals at some point. I think people are ready for change.
completely unrelated but the end of your comment really reminded me of the popular tv series Severance.
You might find it interesting. Anyway best of luck healing! You’ve been through a lot.
I’d say Miraculous is very French, in a good way. In that it doesn’t try to shield children from difficult adult subjects like death and grief and difficult parental relationships. We only do an hour or two of screen time a week right now (including for me and my wife), but Miraculous was a request for last week’s “movie night”.
Then we watch Severance when the kids go to bed and that’s it. Just like there’s junk shows for kids we’ve got junk shows for adults, and it’s hard to deny it to children when we don’t deny it for ourselves. The kids complain way less too when we’re like “well we’re all giving this stuff up”, because they have an innate sense of fairness.
yes, exactly. some people like "weird" and thus probably would like almost anything by kubrick. (i am that person.) but no matter what, my wonderful spouse does not like "weird" tv or movies, and thus does not and will never like kubrick movies (or severance). she's ride-or-die for the hallmark channel, though.
If Stanley Kubrick made a television series, he'd make Severance. For some people that makes it a must-watch, for others, not so much.
> Absolutely not. Have you watched modern streaming services lately?
Of course I have - a typical Netflix movie is between 3-6GB.
Apple TV is the only one offering higher bitrates (which is why I use it, even though we're an Android/Linux only household, with iTunes running in a VM to buy movies from Apple TV).
> There is absolutely no way you get something anywhere equivalent to a recent Severance episode (4K Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos) that Apple is streaming to you at ~25Mbps onto a DVD.
Severance episodes, in 2160p with Dolby Vision and DD+/Atmos audio, are 8.3GB-8.7GB each. While you're technically correct, the point remains.
> I believe the average home connection is something like 100 Mbps if not better, and streaming services really have no trouble delivering Blu-ray quality 4K video to the average US consumer.
A typical 4K UHD bluray has a bandwidth of 95Mbps-120Mbps. A far cry even from the 25Mbps offered by Apple TV, let alone the 6-10Mbps offered by Netflix.
> I think this is actually a bigger barrier than a lot of people assume. I have personally considered the idea of my own media server but keep getting put off by the fact that I really will need a very large NAS-grade HDD for it.
I have a blu-ray collection, I do not have a blu-ray player. I watch my movies by ripping them to my NAS and playing them from my NVIDIA Shield TV.
If you don't do any transcoding on the NAS, you can use an old ThinkCentre or HP Microserver (about $60-$100). If you just rip your own movies from blu-ray, you don't need any redundancy, so you can buy a single 12TB drive for $200.
That's about $250-$300 for enough storage for 450 1080p blu-rays or 160 4K UHD blu-rays.
The only remaining cost is the content, but usually you don't just watch new releases. Used blu-rays are available at e.g. worldofbooks or rebuy for $5-$15 each.
> There is absolutely no way you get something anywhere equivalent to a recent Severance episode (4K Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos) that Apple is streaming to you at ~25Mbps onto a DVD.
Well first off, what percentage of viewing hours are in 4K?
Second, a DVD could store a 54 minute episode at 20Mbps. That's close. And if I found the hdtvtest video you're talking about the bitrate was "between 15 and 25" so it would likely fit as-is. Also, that comparison was seven years ago with Apple using h.265, and today they could use AV1 to get the same quality with 20% fewer bits. Maybe h.266 to be even smaller or better.
(If you're interpreting their comment as "with actual DVD encoding", I think you're misreading them. I don't think they're suggesting streaming services are on par with low-noise 480p. And it doesn't fit with the CD comment.)
I think you might prefer "prestige TV" from the streaming services. They're not trying to fill air time, so they tend to be shorter. They're not ad driven; they just want to have enough content that you keep subscribing.
To be sure, no one streaming service is likely to give you as much good content as you'd like. They're hoping that one good show at a time will keep you subscribed. (They have much, much, much more content, and somebody is watching each of them, but each one appeals to only a smallish set of subscribers.)
The other upside is that they generally keep things around. So if you're willing to watch not-still-being-made shows, you can just binge the content and maybe even drop the service after that.
Anyway... I'm watching Severance, and I think it's pretty great. Probably not enough to convince you to subscribe to AppleTV, but it's one example of a show that gets only 9 episodes per season, so it has to get to its point fairly fast.
No one's buying into that, it's too risky - supposedly. And it's not my field, but I have to think that writers coming up in this media environment have the formulas beaten into them from the start.
I'm struggling to think of truly original movie/TV created in the last 10 years that has stuck around . Maybe in TV there's a few, Severance comes to mind, but everything else is warmed over spy/supe/soap/horror/reality.
Even prestige dramas feel like they were designed to look and feel "important" without actually being important.
They are producing according to a small number of formulas because it's cheap, predictable, easy to make, easy to watch. Above all, we keep watching. Why would they take the risk of making something different?
As I read the story, I thought it would look great as a Ben Stiller-directed show or episode, maybe Black Mirror or a similar anthology.
If you like Severance's grounded absurdity, you might also like the film Corner Office with Jon Hamm.
The TV show Severance shows the modern job and office dynamic very well.
I thought it pretty directly started from the cliffhanger. It took three episodes (at a much faster clip than Season 1 episodes) to deal with the consequences of that cliffhanger, but that's the nature of the severance procedure itself, half the characters can't directly talk to the other half.
I'll preface this by saying I've only watched season 1 of Severance so far.
I have never heard anyone involved with the show suggest this, but I feel pretty strongly that it's based off or at least inspired by Greg Egan's "Learning To Be Me".
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).
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1733785/
I only watched Severance Season 1 last month. I'm actually glad I didn't have to endure the 3 year wait for Season 2. It is an outstanding show and well worth the watch. There are two things that I find interesting about a lot of media:
1. How much of it is nakedly anti-capitalist and many people don't seem to recognize that. Severance is incredibly anti-capitalist and damning of the entire corporate world. It paints the corporate world as soulless and disconnected from reality. The bizarre perks like the wellness sessions, getting to know you, the music dance experience and the waffle party are a searing indictmment on any corporate team-building experience; and
2. How much media is anti-imperialist and we have no problem identifying that the resistance to that are the "good guys" and the authoritarian state are quite clearly the "bad guys" yet, again, people can't seem to see that in real life. The classic example of Star Wars, which George Lucas has explicitly stated that the Rebellion was based on Vietnamese resistance to American imperialist ambitions [1].
Milchick in "Defiant Jazz" lives rent-free in my head. The work is mysterious and important.
[1]: https://www.cbr.com/george-lucas-vietnam-war-star-wars-inspiration/
This is a recreation of a fictional computer program from the excellent Apple TV show - Severance.
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.
Man I love Severance, the black Kier thing in the most recent episode was hilarious but also gave a good insight into Seth ad a character. It showed me that he hadn’t fully given his life to Lumon, in the way that he was still able to dislike decisions they made. As opposed to Natalie.
From watching Severance, the closest parallel to me for a company I ever actually worked for is Disney. Disneyland performer was one of my first jobs, and the orientation is a lot like Lumon's. Video history of the company's reach and achievements. Tremendence reverence for the founder. Disneyland has a statue of Walt holding hands with Mickey at the junction between Main Street and Fantasyland and Main Street itself is a reproduction of Walt's hometown as it was when he was a kid.
And there is absolutely a cult of devoted followers. Even I personally had literal groupies from this job. There were women annual pass holders who'd be there every day to watch me and try to become friends with me. The memorabilia auctions were among the most insane things I've ever seen. Comers from everywhere in the world paying tens if not hundreds of thousands for the slightest piece of something authentic the same way someone will drop a cool mil for a baseball signed by Babe Ruth. There were people who collected annually released pins who'd been doing it for 70 years.
For the fans, it starts in childhood, too. The relationship is so deep that Disney fanatics love the company more than they love their own friends and family sometimes. Even for me, my very first favorite film was The Sword in the Stone, the Disney cartoon from the 60s about King Arthur. I don't even remember it, but my mom tells me I was rewatching it like teenage girls of the 90s rewatched Titanic when I was 4 years old. Disney imprinted itself into me before I even formed permanent memories.
They had global reach, too. Disney perfected this kind of thing way before Apple did.
There is another element to Lumon that I don't think Apple has, too. That's the company town. They own almost everything. Virtually everyone works there or is related to someone who does. Disney kind of had this with the City of Anaheim for a long time, but the city has probably outgrown it at this point. But at one point, they owned most of the land, employed most of the people. Disney owned both of Anaheim's pro sports franchises at one point. One of them was even named after a Disney movie! They had deals with the city to restrict airspace visible from within the park and never to build anything that could be seen to preserve the illusion that you're in an entirely self-contained world separate from the real world. Cal State Fullerton was called "Cal State Disney" at one point because so many of the students were employed there.
There are still streaming shows that drip feed new episodes (S2E3 of Severance releases tomorrow for example) but it’s still somewhat diluted because there is so much content, it’s likely you don’t run into too many people who watch the same stuff as you. I can’t imagine a single show whose finale would have Times Square staring up at the screen like Seinfeld did.
Technology as a narrative element has also evolved.
I distinctly remember watching X-Files in the 90s and thinking this is the first TV show where everyone is assumed to have a cell phone. Moreover, the phone nearly always works! When one of the characters goes wandering into some dark spooky forest in British Columbia, it doesn’t mean they’re going to get their own episode or suffer a mysterious death, they just pop open their phone and call their partner. Suddenly every existing story where phone calls can only be received at fixed locations seems as old as Sherlock Holmes sending a wire by messenger. And nowadays you have to explicitly signal danger by having the character pull out their phone and see NO SIGNAL.
The second season of Severance has a scene where a character leaves his apartment to make a call at a phone booth down the street. In 1980 this would have just signaled that he wanted to make an anonymous call. In 2025 it is alarming. What is this world he’s in where there are still phone booths? Is a shot with the character framed alone, lit by the harsh light of a phone booth at night, a deliberate reference to The Matrix?
What story elements will kids today take for granted? It’s still kind of trendy in stories to show a crowd making videos of something on their phones and causing a ruckus on social media. Maybe ubiquitous video will seem to them like cell phones seemed to us.
Some of these rules look like straight from Severance TV show. This would be a huge red flag for me.
Every episode has a plot twist, I hate slow tv shows, but severance was not!
Severance was the slowest most anti-climatic tv show I've watched in quite a while. Rottentomatoes audience score is 88%.
Anyone have suggestions for what's worth watching on this?
I've only watched Severance on a free month offered by a tie-in a year or so ago.
I love the shows I’ve been following on it like Severance and Big Door Prize, and they’ve had some great docs and feature films too
20 billion and they can’t make a season 2 of severance in less than five years
This includes movies, but browsing their "originals" list, so far I (or my wife) have enjoyed (in no particular order):
Slow Horses Lessons in Chemistry Severance Ted Lasso Shrinking Mythic Quest Roar CODA The Problem with John Stewart And we are looking forward to checking out, in no particular order:
Palm Royale For All Mankind Criminal Record Killers of the Flower Moon Foundation Strange Planet The Morning Show Greyhound They're not all knockout hits. Overall we just feel safer trying something new there. If we don't like it, it's usually just because it's not for us, and less because it feels like an algorithmic, soulless cash grab.
The Morning Show, Severance, Silo, Tehran, Presumed Innocent, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Disclaimer, Shrinking, Loot, Severance, Where's Wanda?, Foundation, Cowboy Cartel (short documentary), Midnight Family, The Last Thing He Told Me, Invasion, Mythic Quest, Bad Monkey, Dickinson...
There's so many good shows on Apple TV.
I agree that Severance was good, but it came out in 2022, and the next season isn't coming out until 2025. Shrinking is another I like, but it came out in early 2023 and just started season 2 this month. I wanted to like Silo, having read the books, but something from the trailer just makes it seem off. I'll probably get around to watching it eventually assuming I don't cancel soon. The others don't appeal to me.
I think if you're ok watching the content weekly and only watch an hour or two, if feels like there is content there, but if you binge like most people who stream do, there is hardly anything there. Most people would probably be better off to subscribe for a month or two a year and cancel the rest of the time.
I agree that Severance was good. I suppose they'll come out with a new season right about the time I think about canceling again. I have also been watching Shrinking, but it's not really enough to keep me on the platform. Apple's content seems to be getting well known actors and then putting them into random shows and hoping that people will find out about them via word of mouth or something. There is also basically no back catalog worth watching like there is with other streaming services.
I believe Apple has some fantastic shows. Severance, Tehran, Silo, Slow Horses, Liason, Physical, For All Mankind (season 1).
You might enjoy the series Severance on Apple TV. It's one of my favorite TV shows of the past 5 years.
I think this is the next sequel to the movie "Her".
You bring up a good point though. Very dystopian idea of a new type of enterprise tooling that emerges to soothe and calibrate human knowledge workers. Very Severance Wellness room.
Foundation the TV show was so interesting to me that it pushed me to read the book series.
I'm currently up to Foundation and Earth. The show is different, but I like the changes they made for the show, especially to the emperor's lineage. The show would be painfully boring if it was filmed in the style of the books with characters talking about what happened instead of showing.
I personally find the mentalics aspect of the books kind of lame, unscientific, and God like. I hope the show does not lean so heavily into them as it continues like the books have, but seems inevitable as I read through the book series.
Severance and For All Mankind get all the hype but See, Silo, and Invasion have all been great. The only true miss in their sci-fi shows for me has been Constellation. The only more boring sci-fi show I can think of is Beacon 23.
I am very confused by Apple TV shows quality. I can‘t really say they are all bad but all in all apart from Severance and maybe Silo all of their SciFi offerings didn‘t really hit for me. Especially Foundation has been such a disappointment that it kind of tainted my feelings towards the whole service. Apart from that it‘s just so strange what kind of technical issues some of the episodes have that they stream (strange audio or brightness issues)
I am always reminded of Severance, the TV show, when I think of LLMs. Data refinement is what is happening massively right now. Basically, take data harvested on the Internet, which may be of poor quality, and use a teacher-student approach to reformulate it in higher quality. Then use that synthetic data to train new models. It's a bit like the biblical multiplication of the bread loaves. How much farther can it get LLMs? I don't know.
During the next turn, though, a lot of the same synthetic goop is going to turn up on the Internet. That's probably why OpenAI is spending the big bucks to secure access to original content producers. Now, here is to hope "original content producers" are not going to depend on LLMs to generate that original content.
I think training data would be plentiful if autonomous drones roamed the face of the earth, constantly recording audio and video. There is nothing as good as reality to learn what real is. The representation of reality on the Internet has become a matter of opinion for a lot of people.
Yes, my personal "Severance" episode.
There are a couple I think are fine. Mythic quest and Severance, but that what was it? Foundation series, omg, I couldn’t make it a whole episode.
I expect he just took his brain. Anything else might be cause for lawsuits. I can imagine a distopic fictional future where part of the brain that stores the last few years work is erased. Similar to the tv show Severance?
I fully recognized that would be required when I was in that situation. The TV show Severance kept coming to mind. I think I only saw a couple of episodes and the basic premise of dividing your mind between work and home was too real and I had to stop.
Thankfully I had an alternative and went back to startups. I could absolutely never accept dividing my brain like that, steeping in cognitive dissonance and just letting myself rot inside. Once you’ve felt the good life - where work is play and learning happens all day long - there’s no amount of money that can be accepted to lose that.
Late comment, maybe you'll see this.
Severance is a slow burn, but the show gets really good at the end of season 1. I highly recommend you give it another chance and watch til the end. IMO, it got better and better every episode until world class level episode in the final 2, 3 episodes of the season.
Its among my favorite shows of all time.
Severance was so boring I cancelled it after 3 episodes. That you enjoyed it tells me I should check silo out :)
Tangentially related: Dark. 3 seasons of sci-fi parallel-world-travel intensity with a satisfying ending.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5753856/
Westworld season 1 & 2 are pretty spectacular too if you missed it. Same producers made the Peripheral, and their adaptation of Fallout is coming in 2 weeks which looks fun.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/V-mugKDQDlg?feature=shared
I loved Severance so much and I'm not sure anything else better will be along for a while, but there is plenty of good stuff out there to pass the time.
I so believe the opposite of this IF you come at the right ones the right way?
Which is to say, once you read (or skimmed) enough of them, it's easy to get a sixth sense of the "intelligence" and "motivation" of the writer, and the sincere ones, even if not smart, are still pretty enjoyable if taken with many salt grains, and I'm a sucker for them (again, not in terms of following exactly what they say to do, but appreciating the motivation and good-intent of the author and possibly picking up something along the way.)
They'll have names like PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS and just be like "try to be nice to people and sit down and be quite a few times a day."
A sort of perfect example would be the fictional "The You You Are" from the TV Show Severance. I hope they actually write it, I know I'd LOVE it.
https://severance.wiki/the_you_you_are_book
I was bored and watched a few episodes. IMHO it was a sci-fi cliché. A context about my tastes in my IMDB rankings [1].
I don't watch many series but I think the sci-fi one Severance (2022) was really great. Also the Three Body Problem is very good (haven't read the books). Nowadays I am very entertained with Tokyo Vice and Shogun. I watched "The Fall of the House of Usher" completely but beyond the excellent production it is void (I am a Poe's fan). Ahhh, before I forget, I really enjoyed The Peripheral (2022). Older, but excellent: "The Main in the High Castle". The first chapters are a bit slow but you should pass them to truly appreciate the terrific acting of Rufus Sewell and the series.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings
[2] https://www.primevideo.com/dp/0G0V91T4S396GV99H5BQ27PH5I
I watched it. The series is decent, but not a masterpiece. The big deal about the books is a lot about emotions (the second one especially), the 3 bodies problem investigation is a big deal, but ends at episode 3 in the show.
Arguably, it's not a lot about war and bad evil guys, but that's how i perceived it in the show.
There is a strong sense of scientific progress in the books which is really lacking in the TV show, probably due to inventions getting limited screen time.
Oh and the big plot twist of the first book, the confirmation of things, comes at the end of the book, so you were never sure, but in the show it gets thrown in your face, which did take away from it.
It was hard to adapt, so they did a decent job. I'm terribly afraid that the protagonist of season 2 will not be up to the protagonist of tge second book. Liu Ji (Seul in the show) is an extremely deep character that you get to know very intimately in the book, I doubt they will be able to pull that off.
Aside from that, it's a watchable show. I found myself way more engaged watching Severance, same for my wife even though she hasn't read the books.
There were a bunch of scenes that really screamed "American made", like when the lady shows up on the airplane, threatening, it felt somewhat disappointing.
SPOILER FROM NOW (scroll past my comment if you don't want to read)
- - - - - The trisolarians are not gangsters, they are scientific, they need to destroy humanity because they cannot trust it, but they were considering living together.
I hate to say this at risk of seeming like I'm over-exaggerating but Severance belongs on the list of best TV shows of all time.
No not everything is bad. Severance, The Bear, Succession off the top of my head are totally worth watching.
I think this post comes from an honest place, but it's a really trite sentiment. And I think this idea that it puts forth that people can separate or partition themselves from their work is wishful thinking. It reminds me of that TV show Severance.
>The idea of a work-life balance is a myth. It suggests that work should be as central to our lives as our passions, which is wrong.
The author of this piece is a creative, and probably has a preoccupation with what her peers are achieving and measuring herself based on that. But I've known people who are waiters or bartenders who end up just as obsessed with their job. It's inherently going to be a part of you. It's part of your life. You can't just turn that off.
Something that's really interesting to me about viewing work through this lens is how disconnected the idea of "work" has become from reality. Every day millions of people wake up and perform all sorts of labor that is absolutely essential to keep societies functioning. Growing and harvesting crops, repairing electrical outages, keeping our water supply clean, picking up trash, etc...
Without that, things would fall apart. But most of those jobs are looked down upon and there definitely isn't a sense of community built by doing them. In any way of humans organizing themselves, labor would be necessary. The author's feelings about work remind me of Karl Marx's theory of alienation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
Severance (the TV show) is a pretty entertaining exploration of this issue.
Still... Maybe its not a good analogy. LLMs are inifinitely replicable and editable. The "concious experience," if you will, is discontinuous even if you assume the architecture will advance massively. We definitely dont need to be talking about rights yet.
Not GP but I also find it somewhat hard to like a TV show, so hopefully that qualifies me :)
The last one that blew my mind was "Severance", and before that "Devs". Both have a very different mood/aesthetic than Breaking Bad, though.
Apple TV original content just sucks.
It’s neutered and toothless in the worst ways possible.
The only somewhat decent thing there was Severance but you can tell by the last episode that they already know how they will ruin it
I had to find out from my Uber driver that Apple TV
* Was a streaming service with a library that could stream on any smartTV, like Netflix
* Only cost $5/month (I assumed since it was Apple it would cost double what other services cost, as opposed to half)
That said, it doesn't have much I want to watch. Severance and Ted Lasso season 1 are good and what else?
I refuse to learn anything about any propietary technologies unless you pay me for every minute I spend doing it. and I'll probably get right on to forgetting it if you stop paying me, but won't really cuz my memory and experience are mine and Severance (tv series) is still fiction
It's the building used in the TV show Severance.
I had a job offer to join Nvidia's office there years ago. Worst financial decision of my life not taking it.
Good first episode. But drags from there on. IMO not even close to Severance.
> Andor ... severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets
Severance S2 reportedly costs $15–20 million per episode to make, and Apple+'s average original series budget is ~$10M/ep.: https://www.gq.com/story/severance-season-2-delayed-behind-the-scenes-drama
Andor S1's budget was reportedly $250M for 12 episodes ($20.8M/ep): https://www.ign.com/articles/andor-season-1-reported-budget-250-million
Which is more expensive than the combined budgets for The Mandalorian S1 and the upcoming Skeleton Crew S1. Tony Gilroy outright said:
“We got lucky making this during the gold rush a few years ago. A lot of people now have cold feet, and you can’t do this show inexpensively.”
https://fandomwire.com/we-got-lucky-you-cant-do-this-show-inexpensively-andor-beats-pedro-pascals-the-mandalorian-as-most-expensive-star-wars-show-ever-made-with-250m-budget/
I have the opposite perspective: studios will stop looking for ways to give audiences what they don’t want (and stop calling them toxic for not wanting it).
People are voting with their wallets. Hollywood in the 90s was much better at entertaining people and therefore much better at getting their money.
Studios will start making shows with good writing again. Apple TV often already is, with some glaringly bad exceptions like Foundation and parts of Ted Lasso season 3. Severance, for example, is good enough on its own for me to pay for the whole subscription.
Making entertaining and thought-provoking original content, without calling their audience sexists or racists when the writing or casting misses the mark, will be profitable and that profit will fund the next wave of prestige tv.
> We're going to look back on the era of prestige TV fondly.
I don't think prestige TV is necesirely expensive though.
The wire, breaking bad, Andor, the bear, severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets.
If anything big budgets have not translated into quality, see GoT, Rings of Power, Stranger Things all getting worse the more moeny thrown at them.
prestigue tv is about talent, and having longer story lines, it just allows for more character work than a movie, but not because of that does it have to cost exponentially more.
Severance is a fantastic show.
I do also like For All Mankind, although its started to get a bit silly in later seasons. Season 1 is great however.
The TV show Severance feels as though it's along those lines of thinking. Separate your work self from your personal self....completely
Severance is the best TV show I've seen in a long time.
I read a lot of Asimov in high school and for whatever reason I didn’t like Foundation.
I also didn’t like the TV series though I will probably watch season 2. It was visually appealing but I found it to be somehow flat. Like, the damage from the collapse of the space elevator - IIRC this was described to great effect in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series - but in Foundation it really felt underwhelming. (That said: “Three Colours Mars” I would definitely watch!)
Also quite weird to see Lee Pace as Empire, since the series I’d just finished was Halt and Catch Fire (recommended).
The one Apple TV show I really enjoyed was Severance. That was amazing.
Compared to competitors, Apple TV+ currently appear to put much more emphasis on quality over quantity in their original content. I really enjoyed some shows like Severance, For All Mankind, Trying, Acapulco, Foundation. It reminds me of the time when Netflix Originals stood for content to be excited about. What they don't have is a back catalog of licensed films and shows included with the flat rate offering (they all cost an extra fee).
Love Severance. Corporate on Comedy Central was really good, too. Lance Reddick... RIP. :.( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5648202/
The obvious solution is to wait until series are done before watching them, if lack of narrative closure upsets more than watching with everyone else excites you. E.g one of these days I might get around to The Wire or Breaking Bad, but probably not Lost or Game of Thrones or Twin Peaks, because I'm aware people were annoyed at how they ended. On the other hand I'm perfectly happy with seasons 1-3 of The Office or season 1 of Stranger things, or Season 1 of Severance even though it was a total life hanger, so it's not impossible to make something that's good even if it's not clear how long it'll run.
Clerks - $27,575 [0]
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - $56,000 [1]
Butt Boy - $100,000 [2]
The Blue - <$100k [3]
Call Me Brother - <$100k [3]
Frances Ferguson - <$100k [3]
Greenlight - <$100k [3]
Love in Dangerous Times - <$100k [3]
Man in Camo - <$100k [3]
I'm going to stop now but I hope I've made my point. I've watched many of the above. I've heard about most of the above.
Your tone is pretty snarky so I'm not sure if it's worth responding but here is a list of TV shows, all within the last decade, that I believe are exceptional and not limited to "just the Sopranos":
* Chernobyl
* Rick and Morty
* True Detective
* Fargo
* Severance
* 1883
* Mindhunter
* Westworld
* The Knick
* The Peripheral
* Succession
* Years and Years
* Orange is the New Black
* Halt and Catch Fire
* Insecure
* Watchmen
* Atlanta
This is only from 10 minutes of searching. You'll note that many of them are produced, directed, written and star high profile artists. The subject matter that they deal with can be done at a pace and care that's impossible to do with a 2-3 hour movie. The quality of the above series or mini-series was virtually non existent, maybe with some very few exceptions, before 2000 and only began to pick up pace in 2000 to 2010.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerks_(film)
[1] https://byrdtheatre.org/news/2019/10/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-brings-beauty-to-vampires/
[2] https://www.cautionspoilers.com/film-reviews/butt-boy/
[3] https://musiccitydrivein.com/2021/02/19/film-threat-award-this-announces-2021-indie-film-nominees-for-drive-in-event-virtual-ceremony/
Love that quote (and hadn't considered media as advice), but in that vein, the TV show Severance absolutely shifted how I perceive work and my separation from it.
I haven’t (yet) watched Twin Peaks but I’d wholeheartedly concur with that endorsement. For quality / episode ratio, I’d put it up there with the first four seasons of the Wire (10/10).
The first episode of Severance is quite slow with regards to plot but still visually compelling. The cinematography, music and character building stay consistently excellent throughout the series but the drama and tension increasingly ramp up so much that my wife and I were on the edge of our seats for the last few episodes. It was so good that I intend to re-watch Season One before watching Season Two (I’m guessing that there will be follow-up) comes out.
My wife and I both really enjoyed the first two seasons of For All Mankind. She generally dislikes science fiction and anything to do with space but was soon won over by the human element and the great characters. However, we both felt that the quality of the show (particularly the writing) fell hard with the third season.
We both also thought that Shining Girls was an excellent mini-series and have Slow Horses lined up to watch next.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I wish networks/services would stop trying to make safe bets with new screen adaptations of classic books and movies. Some of the worst TV I've watched this year has been adaptations of classic books/movies (Foundation, LOTR) and some of the best has been new content (Severance, Raised by Wolves, House of the Dragon).
This really comes down to opinion, and I happen to think there are comparable shows which have aired in the last year (Better Call Saul is as good as, if not better than Breaking Bad in my opinion)
But I think it's silly to argue about that ;) The golden age for you might not be the golden age for me, and most people. Personally, not having to sit through a million ads when I watch TV now makes the TV-watching experience leagues beyond what we had in the late 90s (and sure, we've had some phenomenal shows since Breaking Bad; I'd personally nod at Atlanta, High Maintenance, Maniac, Severance, Game of Thrones S1-5, Undone, and The Expanse)
But we also have access to everything from the 90s and noughts, without the ads and waiting for new episodes
The point I was making in the GP post was that people now have easy access to the long-form storytelling of TV shows, without interruptions and nonstop ads, in a way that didn't exist 10+ years ago. Whether or not you think the TV shows today are better than the ones from the late '90s, people nowadays are choosing watch more TV and less film.
> baffled by my 24 year-old SO’s interest in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows … TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified by what snippets of Discovery and Picard I came across
The thing that bemuses me is those who hate the new trek shows with a passion, and find the time to keep watching and constantly bitching about it online. It is like complaining is a hobby in itself and they are almost looking for something they don't like or to feel superior about their judgement to those who do like it. Other franchises have similar subsets of “fans” too.
I used to watch too much TV/films IMO, I probably still do though I'm a lot more selective since getting into more varied hobbies that can easily consume a lot of time (running (usually off-road), baking, HEMA). But even when I had the free time to watch that much I found there was enough out there that if something didn't work for me I could find a list of other things to try instead of sticking with something I wasn't getting much out of.
Though be careful passing judgement on modern Trek: I'm slowly rewatching TNG with a friend and while some of it has aged well, fair chunks of it was more massively ropey than rose-tinted memories prepared me for! Also, if I hadn't at least passively consumed (i.e. had on TV while I was doing other things so not particularly concentrating on) other parts of recent Trek and Starwars, I might not have bothered to try some of the better stuff like Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and Andor (the latter probably being the second best TV thing recently for me, the first being Severance).
Interesting: Saw the last episode of season 4 and seriously thought it was the conclusion. Yes, there was the flash forward of season one ... but didn't think about that in the moment. And as others said: When you become aware while viewing that the show is stalling, its done. Had a number of these moments in seasons two and three. Now: Can I have Severance season two, please?
I enjoyed these TV shows: - Ted Lasso - Severance - Bad Sisters - Servant - Trying - Mythic Quest - The Morning Show (season 1)
And these movies: - Cha Cha Real Smooth - Swan Song - Coda - The Banker - The Tragedy of MacBeth - The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Looking forward to the Sidney movie as well.
I recently graduated to the next step beyond closed captions: I've started enabling audio descriptions for TV shows too.
It's SO interesting.
They are generally really well put together. And they often highlight things that I would have missed - mentioning the name of a character who joins a scene who I don't instantly recognize, for example.
Even more fun: audio descriptions of the title sequences for a TV show. Three that I particularly enjoyed were Severance, Moon Night and Star Trek: Picard - in all three cases the titles are rich with visual metaphors relating to the show, which the audio description then carefully spells out for you!
I don't say this lightly: Severance is the best tv show I've seen in 10 or 15 (?) years.
It's a fresh story, acted super well, laid out with suspense and mystery, eliciting emotions from laughter to existential dread and depression...
... it's the height of what a TV show can be in 2022.
Have you seen Severance? It doesn't suck.
Sandman sucks. I liked the comics. Had high hopes for the show. But sucks.
Rings of Power. Haven't seen it. Probably sucks. Movies were gaudy but shallow.
There's a documentary about working at Apple called Severance you may wish to watch.
Someone today talked about "artful ambiguity" in reference to Marxism (for the Logistics movie). If capital-exploits-workers is what you believe in, then you will see it everywhere. But it's thin and unsatisfying gruel. Life is more than politics.
I deliberately pick a left-wing magazine, The Atlantic [1], for this. If anyone would apply a socialist rubric to Severance, it's them. Yet the words "capital", "Marx" and "socialist" don't even appear in it.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/02/severance-makes-workplace-eerily-dystopian/622883/
I didn’t really understand severance, at the beginning I thought it was a parody of corridor movies with all these extremely long corridor scenes, but after all I think they really went with the cheap filling option and hope we watchers will think it’s for the atmosphere.
In French we call that a nanar.
https://www.nanarland.com/glossaire/c-comme-couloir-film-de.html
(You can use DeepL to translate French to English, it’s much better than Google translate https://deepl.com ).
Tod Lasso is pretty much universally loved by friends of mine who have watched it. You don't have to be a soccer fan to watch it.
I don't know as many people who have watched Severance, but it's an incredibly good show- as long as Season 2 maintains the quality, I think it'll rank up there with shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad.
Severance is one of the best TV shows I've seen in years.
> Actually, you could say we're in the middle of a transition.
I recently noted the same while watching Severance. Almost all of the episodes, barring one or two, were directed by Ben Stiller. I found it one of the best (first) series ever.
I'm going to need a citation on that. Sources that I read from a quick web search indicate that Apple is spending an average of $10 million per episode on its shows. How "Severance" could cost $300 million, when it takes place almost entirely on an indoor office set, defies plausibility.
And to your point, I loved Black Mirror but couldn’t get through the first episode of Severance.
Its interesting how different tastes people can have. I, for one, couldnt stand Foundation for more than three episodes. Severance, on the other hand, is like a one, series-long, good Black Mirror episode.
Idk if you are referring to Severance, the tv show in Apple TV, but I haven’t seen a show so powerful as that one!
And the Apple TV series Severance.
(yes, I know, person upthread asking us not to analogize everything to TV shows, but that is how culture works and to a great extent what it's for)
How are first party Apple apps so horrible on first party hardware? I don't use Music but I decided to check out Severance (great show) and the TV app was absolutely horrible to use in every way. The player would only stream some really low resolution on my monitor so I tried downloading the episodes and the whole app lagged so badly every time I would queue something up or delete it. It even completely stopped streaming on my monitor because for some reason it thought my HDMI cable didn't support the HDCPI thing and after I put the laptop to sleep and woke it up, it magically started working again. So many other UX problems that I just couldn't put up with and cancelled my subscription after watching the show
Like Xcode, so many of their first party apps on Mac are just badly made and awful to use
Bubbling customers in one or two genres of content with the addition of some "trending" original series that Netflix is pushing at the time. Their support suggests creating multiple profiles to avoid bubbling. You can't even delete/replace/reset main profile - just need to skip it all the time.
Most of original content is just crap produced to fill the library. Netflix creates more and more titles, not watching material. They are cancelling their own shows with such pace that I started avoiding investing time in their new content, assuming they will promptly fuck it up.
Abundance of unnecessary sex scenes. It's almost like watching bad porn: -Ma'am, have you called about cable TV not working? (oh, they're gonna bang now); -Oh, I'm stuck with my head in the washing machine (he's gonna bang her now); -Teacher asks student to stay after class? (banging in 3.. 2...); Opening Netflix (ridiculous, out-of-place sex scenes no matter the content). Just create "soft porn" category already and let people choose.
Production aiming at 100% engagement, giving viewer no time to think. Whatever the genre, every movie or show is unnecessarily action-packed like "Speed" (1994) or "Crank" (2006) making watching feel like work, not relax. Refreshing, thought-welcoming productions like Apple's "Severance" have little place on Netflix platform.
> "This show was so good I couldn't stop watching. But would I watch it again? Hey, this wasn't good at all, I got played"
I presume it's partly because TV and film are much much more expensive to produce than music, and partly music is much more fungible than TV or film - there's way more of it and people are much happier to listen to random music than watch random films.
I mean if you've heard about Severance and want to watch it it's much more annoying that it's only on Apple TV than if one specific band isn't on Spotify. It's more noticeable and annoying.
I just pay for Prime and Netflix and pirate the rest.
You might like Severance the tv show, and The Stanley Parable game hahahaha zero shame here too, I'm exchanging my time and skill for salary nothing wrong with a hustle!
Severance does not have the drunk/high sequences, but it was just crazy slow for me. I might also just be an atypical watcher, but it still feels like a lot of shows/movies are a lot longer than they used to be when I was a kid, and yet the extra minutes do not give me any extra enjoyment. Or maybe I am just getting old and turning into my dad.
I dislike this format because it makes a 4 hour story into an 8 hour story where 4 hours of it is showing the character in some type of inebriated state. I think flight attendant did this too, and the only reason I can think of is to pad their statistics and it being cheap to film those sequences. But it just ends up boring me.
And all the content producers are doing it. I tried Severance on Apple TV+, and I had to stop after 4 episodes because nothing was happening, and this is supposed to be a critically acclaimed show.
The new Batman movie was excruciatingly long too. I miss my 100min stories from the early 2000s and before.
Uh, you’re not actually required to watch something just because it exists. Some subset of people not liking content isn’t, in and of itself, reason to stifle peoples ability to create said content.
The job of a literature professor is not to protect Literature by ensuring that inadequate students are never allowed to write.
If some combination of AI and community driven filtering can prevent sub-par works from entering your queue, you are no worse off.
On the other hand, some scripts like Severance, which languished for years on the best-scripts-never-made list, would likely never have been (finally) made but for the vast expansion of content creation due to the rise of streaming. In fact, if only a dozen movies were allowed to be made each year, they would probably all be Marvel movies or something with similar mass appeal. Most of the truly innovative work appears at the margins, hence expanding the margins is more likely to yield groundbreaking art (along with a ton of crap).
The thing I find interesting with Netflix is how much they spend on content and what a terrible rate of return it has. Look at Apple TV+, they're absolutely TINY compared to Netflix in both library size and money spent on new production, but they have arguably more hits than Netflix. Like, since when has any drama on Netflix been as buzzy or as good as Severance on Apple TV+? When was the last time they had a comedy success like Ted Lasso?
They have a couple of things that are very good (including Russian Doll, which is better than the article gives it credit for). But it's the ratio the that's troubling: the value of [good shows] / [shows produced] is absurdly much lower for Netflix than for Apple TV+, HBO Max or Disney+. All their spending seems to result in is endless mediocre True Crime documentaries that try recapture the magic of the first season of Making a Murderer, and the occasional golden nugget you binge in a weekend.
The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
Wasn't Campion's Power of the Dog an Oscar-rated Netflix film? I agree overall however, Apple is competing with the legacy content monsters the right way. Severance was great art, Slow Horses is compelling, Foundation had its issues but also better moments than any Netflix Sci-Fi show I've seen the past few years (Nightflyers, Another Life, etc don't even come close), and For All Mankind is well-written.
What makes the lifting enjoyable for folks? I personally find commuting to the gym, lifting for an hour or two, and heading home to be kinda draining. I feel “better” after doing it but mainly only because I felt like I was making progress and there was less guilt for doing something. The actual time in the gym sucks and just feels like a hamster in a wheel. I’ve never found a way to not make it this way.
After all - I’m at the gym, solo grinding for XP, and surrounded by guys with 8-packs who are 5 years ahead of me. Even if I get to where they are, no guarantee that it’ll have been “worth it”. Being in the gym literally feels like I’m in the tv show “severance”. (Admittedly I haven’t seen the show - I just know the premise) It’s completely lost time and at no point enjoyable. It’s what I imagine people with two hour commutes feel like but now add in physical pain and discomfort.
Netflix is screwed.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.
I'm older than dirt.
Last week I watched 'Severance' on Apple TV. It was very good. Last night I watched the first episode of 'Tokyo Vice' on HBO Max and it was definitely good enough that I'll keep watching.
Sure, Billie Eilish sucks, but Wet Leg doesn't. (Apologies if you like Bilie Eilish, but art is subjective, not objective.) There's good stuff out there being made today, you just have to look for it.
This is nonsense. ATV is struggling to build a library worthy of a subscription.
Over the last 2-3 years, I sign up when a season of a show I hear good things about is completely out (Ted Lasso, Severance, etc) and then watch another show or movie or two for the month it takes me to finish that season.
I have never bumped into another show that made it worth renewing for a consecutive month, despite the show that I came for being totally worth the one month, and there being other shows that are strongly "related".
I will admit the production quality of the shows is very high on average, but that's not the same thing as the shows being very good.
Ironically and funnily enough, i expect the ('Apple-made') TV Show 'Severance' to become a reality.I suspect it already is, hyperbolically speaking.
A society seeped in commodified self-critique renders impotent any critique of real substance.
That's what's so intriguing about the current political economy. It has effectively packaged up critiques of itself and folded them into the spectacle. Through this lens Severance may be a harbinger of future work critique films. Given the state of labor relations it's easy to imagine an appetite for films that give viewers the cathartic release of work tension they hunger for. In the context of the first statement, it's also easy to see the dangers in this pattern of behavior.
Following Severance (which will be out in February) Apple TV+ will also release an eight episode series called "WeCrashed" based upon the WeWork saga in March [1].
And if you haven't seen it, there is also Mythic Quest (seasons 1 and 2) that is an Apple TV+ comedy series based in the offices of a game studio.
Also don't forget The Morning Show which is an Apple TV+ drama based in the offices of a fictional breakfast TV show.
So no matter what type of dysfunctional workplace you may enjoy, Apple will have you covered.
[1] https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2022/01/academy-award-winners-jared-leto-and-anne-hathaway-star-in-new-apple-original-limited-series-wecrashed-premiering-globally-march-18-2022/