Severance Review

Nobody is making a better-looking show. Stiller frames the severed floor in rigid symmetry, endless white corridors, green monochrome terminals and a carpet that swallows sound, and Jessica Lee Gagne shoots the snowbound Kier exteriors so the contrast does the thematic work without a line of dialogue. Adam Scott gives two performances in one body, the innie's brightness and the outie's grief, and Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, John Turturro and Patricia Arquette all operate in a register the show invented for them.

Macrodata Refinement, sorting numbers by how they make you feel, is a perfect image of alienated labour. Its weaknesses are pacing and payoff. The premise raises questions the series answers at a deliberately stingy rate, entire episodes are spent relocating people within the same corridor, and the second season's expansions arrive without the coiled tension of the first.

The dialogue is functional outside its corporate liturgy. None of it outweighs what the show does better than anything else on television: a world, a mood and a cast in perfect lockstep. A gorgeous, patient, occasionally maddening object, and the reckoning is still owed.