Northeastern workplace expert Sam Waterman says the series’ popularity could be part of a nostalgia for a capitalist concept that took hold during the Victorian era.
LONDON — There is creating a healthy work-life balance — and then there is the extreme of having the two surgically divided.
That is the premise behind the hit television series “Severance,” which has hooked millions of viewers since its release in 2022.
The Emmy-winning Apple TV show follows the lives of a team of office workers who have undergone a procedure that erases all memory of their personal lives while at work. And the same is true vice-versa — once clocked off from their job at Lumon Industries, the characters have no memory of what they did all day.
With Season 2 starting to air on Friday, Jan. 17 — a new episode of the 10-part series is scheduled to drop each week on the streaming platform — fans will finally get to find out more about the workers and their quest for the truth about their out-of-office lives.
Sam Waterman, an expert in the histories and theories of work at Northeastern University, says the idea of compartmentalizing home and work flourished in the 19th century as societies became more capitalist.
“The hard separation between work life and home life is a Victorian invention — or at least one that develops in the lead-up to the Victorian period,” he says.
“You can think about that as a compensatory relationship. One thing capitalism does is really rationalize the working day and makes people act like efficient machines. And then you have this highly sentimentalized and romanticized home life afterwards with the family.”
Waterman, assistant professor in English on Northeastern’s London campus, points to Charles Dickens’ novel “Great Expectations,” published in 1861, as containing an example of the type of split personality that could exist in Victorian times, when work and home were seen as things to be kept apart.
The character John Wemmick, a legal clerk, is a “cutthroat commercial figure” in Dickens’ story, says Waterman, but the quaint cottage home that he retires to each night is idyllic, with its surrounding moat and drawbridge.
“It is this incredibly sentimentalized scene of personal home life,” continues Waterman. “Wemmick won’t allow any talk of home at work, or any talk of work at home, so there is this kind of severance between those different personas.”
Waterman argues that the popularity of “Severance” could be related to a nostalgia for that separation to exist once again — a reaction to our modern and technologically-driven world where the lines between work and home are blurred like never before.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced workers to adapt to full-time remote working, mixing family and colleagues together through Zoom calls. With work-related WhatsApp groups on our cellphones or the Slack conversation app only a click away, it can be hard to put distance between business and pleasure.
It was during the cultural revolution in the 1960s that business leaders first began to listen to calls for the working environment to become more welcoming to women and a diversity of personalities, explains Waterman, citing the 1999 book “The New Spirit of Capitalism,” written by sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.
“That early integration of home and work life for a while was maybe quite appealing to a lot of people,” continues Waterman, “because it allowed them to be more human in the workplace. But then I think something that happens subsequently is we start to feel like, ‘Well, do I really want to bring my full self to the workplace? Do I really want to give my whole soul to my job?’
“And then you get things like the pandemic, which blur the lines even more, where the actual physical space of the home is blurred. And so I wonder whether something like ‘Severance,’ although it is also dystopian, is also nostalgic for an older split between work and home life.”
Tomas Elliott, a specialist in the history of theater and film, puts forward the viewpoint that the dystopian nature of “Severance” — starring Adam Scott and Britt Lower — sees it play out almost like “The Matrix,” the 1999 Keanu Reeves film, in reverse.
There are even similarities in the way it is shot. The green hue of scenes filmed inside “The Matrix” — a virtual reality that humans are plugged in to — is replaced in the Ben Stiller-directed episodes of “Severance” with the clean white walls and seemingly never-ending corridors of the Lumon office block.
“‘The Matrix’ was speaking to anxieties around the growing digitization of the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” says Elliott, “and this sense of being trapped and not being in control of that reality anymore.
“The hero is the one that recognizes its illusory reality and that becomes a hero arc for Neo (played by Reeves) to take the red pill and dare to know the truth. ‘Severance’ seems to be exploring an inversion of that narrative by depicting a world in which people can choose to go back into a ‘Matrix’ of sorts.
“You have these individuals who have been put in an office space against their will. They don’t have any choice about whether to go to work or not. And in fact, their whole existence is within work. They can’t even resign unless their outer-world persona decides to allow them to resign, so they are endlessly trapped and there is no escape from that workplace for them.”
The Northeastern assistant professor in English, who is currently researching the post-pandemic rise of recurring birth nightmares in horror stories, says the series seems to be drawing on the sense of being digitally trapped that some people feel in Western society.
“I wonder if ‘Severance’ is a way of exploring an increased sense of the totalization of the digital world that we experience today,” says the London-based academic. “That the dream of entirely separating ourselves — of being able to get entirely away from global networks of data, capitalism, social media, etc. — is a complete illusion.”
He points to Scott’s character Mark and the fact that his decision to become a so-called “severed” employee is driven by grief experienced in his personal life. But separating his work and personal personas does not appear to satisfy him, Elliott argues.
“Mark has created this separation as a way of dealing with grief, with trauma,” Elliott says. “But it doesn’t seem so far to have granted him any release. There doesn’t appear to be any healing that goes on.
“I think it points to the idea that something like work-life balance, something like separation, is in fact a kind of fetish. It is something that has been created by capitalism itself as a sort of illusory goal to make us feel happier about our lives.”