Lumon Industries – A Fictional Reality.
NEW YORK – In August 2022, I watched the first season of Severance on an airplane. The first three episodes were available as a limited preview on my Delta flight, and I watched all three in succession. Upon my landing in Rome, after settling into a new apartment, I bought an Apple TV + subscription so I could watch the whole season that night.
The major cliffhanger at the end of season 1 annoyed me, because I had no idea how I was going to wait until the second season was released. I was entrapped in the universe of Severance, because I had just spent 10 hours there – laptop screen to face.
After weeks and weeks, I slowly forgot about Severance. I was only reminded of it this January, when I saw the news about Adam Scott, Britt Lower, and the rest of the cast trapped in glass boxes in Grand Central, a creative promotion for the upcoming release of season 2. I immediately made my sister sit and binge with me the entire first season, and the first episode of the second season the day it came out. That was Friday, January 17th.
There was no second or third or fourth episode to binge, because both seasons of Severance released episodes weekly – not all at once, like many streaming platforms do. As the hype built from the Grand Central stunt and word of mouth about the show’s genius drama, viewers were forced to watch the show in traditionally televised weekly increments, rather than shoveling the whole show into their mouths in one sitting. In the empty space between episodes, a missing part of American culture finally returned.
The American Rush
Americans are always, always, always in a rush. We eat in the car on the commute to work, more people drink coffee in paper cups on the go than sitting and actually enjoying their drink, and waiters and waitresses drop paper bills at our tables before we’ve even finished half of a steak. When Americans go abroad, they come back beaming with life and wonder after being enamored with the Spanish siesta or annoyed by the Italians’ slow walk. It really does feel like, in the modern USA, that you can either take a nap, or you can have a job. You can enjoy cooking and eating a meal, or you can have enough money to afford that meal. There’s a choice between money and time, and Americans, more than anyone else in the western world, choose money.
Unpaid lunch hours, mobile app orders, one day shipping from Amazon, etc.etc. – these are all woven into the very tight fabric of US time. It’s not that these things don’t exist in other countries in North America, Europe, and Australia, but the USA is unique in its largely for profit healthcare systems and schools, and, colloquially, the spirit of “the grind.” I always felt as a little girl that in New York, you really could be whoever you wanted. You can do anything you set your mind to. These dreams become watered down as you get older – but Americans- in a way I truly admire my own culture, really do work hard, and work a lot. But the trade off is time. We all want everything quickly, there’s no time to sit around, and it’s not very socially accepted to do so. Severance’s brilliant science fiction aside, really nails the American corporate drawl, and the idea of living to work rather than working to live.
Mark S. The Main Character of Severance.
The Ins and Outs of Innies and Outies (A Season 1 Summary)
Spoilers! Just watch it!
If you haven’t watched yet, Severance, in a quick summary, is a sci-fi/ office drama series in which the main characters, working at big and evil corporate conglomerate “Lumon,” go under the knife to get the “Severance” procedure. A chip is implanted into their brains, effectively “spatially dictating,” as the show says, their consciousness and memories. One part of their brain for their personal life, and one part for their work life.
At work, they can only access their work selves – their “innies” – and outside only their “outies.” When they descend to the severed floor at Lumon at 9 am, they use only the work part of their brains until they clock out at 5. As if no time has passed. Outies don’t know what they’re doing at work, and Innies don’t know what their outside lives look like. And of course, dark secrets and abuses from Lumon are exposed, but only to the innies.
For a while, this is okay at Lumon. Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry), Irving (John Turturro), and Petey (Yul Vazquez), make up the Macro Data Refinement department, doing nothing more specific than “refining data,” until suddenly the head of their small, mysterious and important department, Petey, is fired. It’s revealed in the very first episode of the series that Petey has “reintegrated” his brain, fusing his work life and personal life and memories back together, un-severing himself. Petey is running from Lumon, in an attempt to get his full brain back.
Helly (Britt lower), joins MDR as a replacement, and immediately stirs up the department. She desperately tries to quit her position and smuggle messages about Lumon’s abuse of its employees, but her outie wants her to stay. Throughout the season, romances develop, cultish secrets about Lumon start to reveal themselves, and the MDR department plans their escape from Lumon by discovering a switch that will sever them outside of the severed Lumon floor.
In the season 1 finale , Dylan, during his sexually suggestive waffle party, switches the mechanism that will turn his coworkers into their innies, wherever they are outside of work at that time. The team quickly follows their plan to expose Lumon, and tell the details of what they know to whoever they can. Helly finds herself at a presentation, hosted by her father, Jame Eagan, the current CEO of Lumon. Helena Eagan, Helly’s real life identity was supposed to do incredible PR for Lumon, and tell the world that severance is a good thing – that her innie is happy, healthy, and severed. Instead, Helly exposes what she really knows about Lumon, quickly tackled and silenced by her innie boss on stage. With the shocking revelation that Helly, the feistiest of MDR, is part of the Eagan family in her outside life, season 1 ends.
So, the three year wait for Severance season 2 began, and as of the beginning of 2025, the new episodes are released every Friday, first premiering on the 17th of January. At time of writing, the next and sixth episode of Severance s2 will be released on Friday, February 21st.
Season 2, so far, has been more exciting and action packed than the first, and, from what I can see on the internet, much more popular. Without spoiling any details of the most recent developments – there are more intense changes happening to the innies, outies, and Lumon. Severance is Apple TV’s number 1 show, and is setting and breaking records for viewership every week. The hype of regularly scheduled programming is back!
The “Macrodat Uprising.”
What this Means for America
Beyond the obvious parallels to American corporate work culture and life that Severance explores, which has already been written about at length all over the web – the most interesting part of Severance’s second season is the way it’s brought Americans together.
In the not so distant past, it was regular, and, arguably, socially crucial behavior for friends, colleagues, and families to watch TV show episodes each week, and discuss what happened in each installment- whether they viewed it together or apart. The time in between the release of these episodes was what built relationships and friendships, and general social functioning. People became smarter and thought more critically simply because they had more time to digest and think about what they saw, what they thought about it, and what others that were close to them were saying about it.
Instagram posts about Severance and other TV media host comment sections filled with the sentiment that viewers look forward to every Friday, when they know there will be a new episode that they’ve been anticipating. It’s exciting, and it’s delayed. Reddit and other social media apps are flooded with theories and memes and conversation about the show – replacing what used to be conversations at work or school or somewhere else. Now that many people work online, or go to school online, and spend much of their free time online, the spaces on the internet have replaced a lot of “hallway small talk.”
The explosion of streaming applications and exponential growth of short form content on apps like TikTok and Instagram have mirrored the American hustle and rush by squeezing tons and tons of information into the shortest and most quickly digestible ways of consumption as possible. Books can be summarized in 30 second TikToks, and since the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, binge watching whole TV shows has become incredibly normal behavior. There is an element of stability and familiarity of being able to watch what you want to, in its entirety, in one sitting – because that is what’s deemed most productive in contemporary American culture. Wasting no time. Working through lunch, graduating college early, eating in the car, “HOW TO: Become a millionaire before 26!” – These pressures in daily life to be as fast as possible rather than enjoying or even tolerating the process of life, career, and relationships affect our ways of consuming media. Like, finishing a show as quickly as possible.
The actual act of binge watching is not something I’m critical of. I like to binge watch TV as well. But the overarching problem is that most young Americans have not been literally forced to wait 7 days between TV show episodes in a long time. This stark change in viewership tendencies have been positive for the collective mind and social spheres. With unfurling political and economic chaos, Americans can bond over excitement for the next episode, and find comfort in the thoughts and relationships that they develop because of this wait, rather than the escapism of losing yourself to binge watching for 8 hours.
Of course, the actual plot and themes of the show are quite reflective of the American rush and corporate pressure that evades all parts of life as well. Mark avoids his problems by disappearing for 8 hours a day into his innie mode, much like the way it is easy to escape reality by watching something for hours. TV is addicting, TikTok is addicting, escaping life by way of media consumption is addicting. The team behind Severance and their decision to disperse the show weekly rather than all at once, builds a culture around entertainment that has been lost for a few years. The United States, so new as a country, really does rely on entertainment to connect its people, rather than history. Finally, some connections are being made once again.
“Welcome Back.”
Grace Stathatos
GritMag 2025