Severance: it’s a gorgeously odd return for this surreal drama – if you can work out what’s happening

The clever, idiosyncratic satire of workplace culture returns for a visually stunning second season. But don’t expect its mysterious plot to go easy on viewers

In my early 20s, I worked for a pub that was half drinking establishment, half massive children’s soft play area. While adult intoxication and parties for under-10s sounds like an odd commercial pairing (or does it?), it did mean that the pub’s employees had to work hard, serving pints for the adults and, for the chosen few, dressing up as a giant bear and waving to the kids assembled for little Jack’s seventh birthday party. I bring this up because I still remember a poster on the wall of the bleak staffroom that read “A& smile costs nothing”. We were sweating under a synthetic bear’s head while serving soggy chips for minimum wage, so surely I was the one to be the judge of that.

Severance is that poster brought to life as prestige TV. The first season was a clever, original and surreal examination of bland yet passive-aggressive corporate culture, wrapped up in a thorny puzzle that made you feel smart for playing along. Certain employees of the mysterious and cult-like company Lumon were “severed”, their personalities split into two distinct states of being. The “innie” worked for Lumon, oblivious to the life of their “outie” outside the office, and vice versa. It was a neat twist on the doppelganger trope, and as the four employees of the macrodata refinement team began to gain awareness of what being severed had cost them, a rebellion started to brew.