If you’re not current on season 2 of “Severance” — including episode 4, “Woe’s Hollow” — you might want to clock out now, because this article contains spoilers.
When the series finale of “Seinfeld” aired in 1998, I remember sitting down with my parents to watch it. A handful of years later, my mom asked me to join her while she watched the series finale of “Sex and the City” (before I’d ever seen the actual show itself, actually). During the run of “Game of Thrones,” I loved inviting a big group of friends over to my tiny apartment to react to the show in real time. This is all to say that I miss TV shows and singular episodes with such a huge cultural footprint that everyone sits down to watch it at the same time. In recent years, shows like “The White Lotus” have helped satisfy this requirement, and the last season of “Succession” was probably the best example of what we can call “appointment television,” meaning that everyone watches a show when it airs so they can discuss it and not hear any spoilers. So far, there’s only one show that scratches this itch airing in 2025, and that’s “Severance.”
Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller’s bizarro workplace drama, which imagines a horrifying world where you split your consciousness to go to work, sending your “innie” to the office while your “outie” remains ignorant, aired its first season on Apple TV+ in 2022, and even though we had to wait three long years for the second season, it was well worth it. This is the first time since “Succession” ended that I’ve put everything else in my life aside at a specific time just for a TV show. On Thursday nights at 9 P.M. EST, I put my phone on “do not disturb,” get a snack, and lock in on “Severance,” and having an appointment TV show has been a bright light in these weary times.
Is Severance bringing appointment TV back?
Season 2 of “Severance” — which picks up shortly after the desperate innies Mark S. (Adam Scott), Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), Irving B. (John Turturro), and Helly R. (Britt Lower) reach the outie world and try to reveal what’s really going on at the sinister Lumon Industries — hit the ground running when it started its run on Apple TV+ in January of this year, and as of this writing, it’s only aired four episodes. Still, the things it’s done within those four episodes are remarkable in terms of pacing. Within just four hours of season 2, “Severance” has watched as Mark’s outie undergoes “reintegration,” a process that fully merges innies and outies and notably killed outie Mark’s friend Petey (Yul Vasquez) in season 1, and episode 4, “Woe’s Hollow,” confirmed a major twist many viewers had already guessed: Helena Eagan, Helly’s outie who’s part of the Eagan family that runs Lumon (and its weird religious cult), has been masquerading as her own innie.
It’s genuinely thrilling to sit down for every episode of “Severance” week after week, which leads me to another point: A show like “Severance” that requires your full attention and is buzzy enough that you’ll get spoiled on social media if you miss the new episode would be wasted on a binge release. Unlike Netflix, Apple releases their shows week by week so you have to keep tuning in to keep up, and the world needs a riveting, often funny, and emotionally gripping weekly show that gets audiences in front of their TVs at a specific time. “Severance” is appointment TV in a streaming age, and I’ve never been so grateful to ignore texts and pings while I give my full attention to something.
I spoke about this season of “Severance” and a handful of other things I’ve been watching on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:
“Severance” is streaming on Apple TV+ now.
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