What kind of show is Severance?
Yes, I know I’m a little late to the party, but I’m about through the end of Season 1 of Severance, and there’s one meta question I’m asking myself. No, it’s not what is actually going on, how does severance work, or what the purpose of the Lumon Corporation is, though these are all reasonable questions. My question is more what kind of show am I watching? In particular, am I watching a show like Lost and Dollhouse or am I watching a show like The Prisoner or The X-Files? Because if it’s the latter, I’m going to hate myself for getting sucked into this.
All of these are shows in the rough genre of science fiction or fantasy or speculative fiction that Severance clearly falls into. That is, they are all shows Where the protagonists are living in a mysterious world that neither they nor the viewers understand, and a large part of the interest in the show is simply figuring out what the hell is going on. It’s a mystery show, but not a whodunit or even a howdunit.
However, within that subgenre we can further subdivide these sorts of shows. The key difference is not what the protagonists know or what the viewers know, but what the creators know or don’t know. In Lost and Dollhouse, the creators knew from the beginning where they were going, what was going on, and what they were doing, at least to a reasonable extent. They didn’t reveal it all in episode one, but they did have some understanding of what was happening.
By contrast, in The Prisoner and especially in the X-Files, the creators had absolutely no clue what was going on, nor did they care to know. They simply made up weird shit for every episode without any idea at all about why it was happening. Hey, this is cool. Let’s stick in killer bees, a crash victim who suddenly spews poison gas, a big ball of goo that drags people back to the island, or worst of all a pointy thing we can stab people in the back of the neck with to kill them. We don’t understand why the pointy thing works. We don’t understand who the weird people are. We’ll figure that out later. Arguably in The Prisoner this sort of worked, probably because the show only ran for one season and 17 episodes though it still leaves me feeling unsatisfied, but in The X-Files it totally didn’t.
I really hope that the creators of Severance have some clue about what is going on in their world and how this might ultimately be resolved because if they don’t, this is going to suck really hard.
