Business as Usual

Three years ago, the first season of the TV show Severance premiered at a huge inflection point—or so it seemed—for labor in the United States. COVID-19 had demystified the crisis of capitalism in tragic fashion, and this demystification in turn spurred the Great Resignation, as well as hope for a greater paradigm shift. White- and blue-collar workers alike sought more meaningful employment and aimed to combat the alienation of work through union power. Young people in particular, perhaps less accustomed to the dehumanizing conditions of labor, looked ready to spring into action. And on our screens, Severance—which follows a group of Lumon company employees who have chosen to surgically bisect their working and personal lives—perfectly channeled the moment’s most earnest hopes for change. That first season ended in a workers’ rebellion, powered by their deep desire to “burn this place to the ground.” The Macrodata Refinement (MDR) team found their lives intolerable. Many Americans said the same thing. The MDR team decided to do something about it. Many Americans did, too. What would happen next?

On January 17, 2025, three days before the presidential inauguration and ten days before the new president fired the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, the second season of Severance arrived as a grand indictment of the past three years. At the outset of Season Two, the rebellion has been crushed; the MDR employees return to work having failed at their two central goals: to solve the mystery of what they actually do, and to change the structural conditions of their labor. All their working decisions remain premade, all their actions preplanned, all their brain work outsourced to the “Board.” As of the third episode of Season Two, the closest they have come to answering the question of whether they are killing people eight hours a day is to have discovered a room full of sheep.

In short, they are back to business as usual, still isolated from the moral cost of their labor and their lives outside of the office. Upon their return to work, MDR is now subjected to a parody of anti-union maneuvering: Floor Manager Mr. Milchick shows the team a video that replays the now celebrated and company-sanctioned story of their revolution, which has been christened “The Macrodat Uprising”; the video itself opens with the title card “Lumon is Listening,” a double entendre that both displays the company’s commitment to “caring” for its employees and its commitment to surveilling their every working, waking moment; Milchick gives Dylan’s “innie” the secret and exclusive privilege of meeting his wife, a move intended to fracture the team’s solidarity; they are given hall passes; fruit leather and “cut beans” have been added to the vending machines. In place of revolution, Lumon offers the MDR team “bounteous reforms.” I’m reminded of the “bounteous” work-from-home policies many received as an outgrowth of the pandemic (so bounteous they are now being taken away). And don’t forget the pet insurance!

The management at Lumon covers up their structural issues with cosmetic changes; many of the short-lived reforms of the post-pandemic moment were equally so. Today, wages are stagnant for many demographics, AI poses poses new threats to union power, union membership itself is on a continued decline and Trump, as mentioned, has rendered the NLRB kaput. Could labor, or the employees at Lumon, have done anything differently? To be sure, Severance’s second season does not shift the blame of these disappointments onto the workers’ shoulders. But what Severance does take aim at is our collective tendency to be passive in the face of professedly intolerable circumstances. I could not help but think, watching Mark grudgingly accept a fruit basket and a 20 percent raise in order to return to work, of friends making their own Faustian pacts with morally suspect companies, of the vapidness of the Quiet Quitting trend, and even of Democratic Party leaders decrying the coming threat of Trump’s fascism only to abdicate the seat of power with not a quack of dissent. The brilliance of Severance’s second season is to argue that this is still the time of a Great Resignation, only that we’ve exchanged one meaning of “resign” for the other. This other resignation is much more cynical and ubiquitous; it’s a twee tiredness with politics as such, which often takes the form of capitulating to the very forces we claim to stand against: the allure of capital and the anti-labor, anti-“woke” right.

The New Yorker’s review of the season is a case in point: Inkoo Kang comments dismissively that “Marx’s theory of alienation has never been taken so literally,” and that the show is “far from a dissection of work and life as we know them.” Could the MDR staff at Lumon actually be killing people? “Maybe!” she writes, echoing the cynical apathy that Severance critiques.

When I first began watching Severance in 2022, I was working as a paralegal in Chicago and feeling overworked, isolated and infantilized by the job. I didn’t feel connected to the meaning of the work, which was drudgery, and I wasn’t compelled by the company’s sense of community, which they tried to foster by converting the entire top floor of the office into a volleyball court and stocking the fridge with whatever snacks we wanted. Severance was, in fact, what spurred me to action. I had never seen a television show engage with the mysteriousness and alienation of work as such. I felt an earnest pride when, right before the fifth episode was released on March 11th, I quit my job.

But I was wrong then to think that Severance revealed modern work to be unsatisfying, or worse. That much we already knew (See: “McJob,” “Work Sucks,” “Work Won’t Love You Back,” etc.). With every episode I watch of this season I wince, realizing now that the show’s achievement is its demonstration of how perfectly we’re able to diagnose a shitty situation when we see one without having the ability, or will, to do anything about it. In 2022 I quit one job simply to take another one, like many other Americans at the time. I didn’t unionize, or agitate for deeper change in the structure of my work. Today, the Department of Labor is next in line to be targeted by Elon Musk and Trump’s hollowing out of the federal government; our highest, most desperate hopes are for the protection of the status quo. For MDR, at least, an upheaval of Lumon may still be in the cards. In the latest episode, Mark—desperate, determined and scared—“reintegrates” his innie and outie selves with the help of a defected Lumon surgeon. Severance is, after all, a show that needs a climax and a resolution, not a playbook for how to change our working lives. We’ll need a lot more than television to accomplish that.