I could've written that NYT's piece! Definitely agree that they're going too heavy on style and sacrificing substance. White Lotus, on the other hand, does a great job of balancing. It got a bit flaccid in a few of the early episodes, but I'm lovin where it is going now!
For me, the Severance issue this season is that they tried to build too much plot while still keeping as much as possible a mystery.
In the first season, everything being confusing and enigmatic worked well because it was mostly just world-building. The tension of all of the plot was just in grasping the how it all functions.
That approach starts to wear thin when you actually try to drive plot forward within the world you've built. You either need to provide more information for the plot to be tethered to a reality with comprehensible stakes, or you need to keep world building and expanding your universe for awhile to support the constant confusion.
Otherwise, it starts feeling like Lost, which descended into an absolute mess as the writers scrambled to maintain the excitement of the whole mystery because no one in the writers room actually had any idea how to navigate the plot forward.
Severance, for me, has hit the point where the absolute refusal to give us any real information has become obnoxious to me, since I'm supposed to be heavily invested in what's happening now, not just intrigued by the hints as to how their universe functions.
Also, this entire season hinges on how the outies behave, but we've had remarkably little insight into what their world looks like. How big is Lumon? What does the world think Lumon even does? How well hidden is it's cult stuff?
How do they have so many severed staff for random shit like a dedicated marching band, an entire team of art curators, but only 3 staff doing the
super important work, and virtually zero security staff?
I mean, I get a commitment to vague weirdness, but it has to operate within a consistent framework of logic.
And yeah, why sideline most of the most charismatic characters just to introduce more inscrutable characters that we cannot understand and definitely cannot enjoy?
We spent so much of season 1 getting to know the sister and her husband, Turturro and Walken, and don't get me started on the ex-Lumon scientist trying to reintegrate Mark. Who is she? Why does she get zero character development?? And why are all of the senior Lumon characters all such caricatures of evil? A bunch of whacky cult leaders? That's rich soil for interesting villains, but they're all just the same, generic weird, detached, evil.
I've read so much about Scientology, the root of what makes it fascinating is how they control the people at the top of the organization. It's the fact that the more power you have in it, the more controlled you are through horrific abuse. Senior cult members are not mindless devotees, they're extremely complex victim-perpetrators, so I find myself perpetually irritated by the flatness of these very senior Lumon characters.
Again, they've opted for the intrigue of mystery at the expense of investment in the stakes for the plot they're trying to move forward. To me, they tried to move way too much plot forward with too much commitment to the mystery that made the first season magical. I don't think they actually needed to move the plot forward that aggressively. I think they could have done a whole second season of slow world-building with lower stakes plotlines and introducing more characters, while still maintaining the confusion.
And why was reintegration such a massive focus of both seasons of they were going to essentially discard it as a major plot device, again, with zero explanation. Also, if our whole focus is now on Mark's innie and outie experience, why do we get absolutely no discussion of the process of him reintegrating, beyond that it seems to be vaguely life threatening, and he's motivated to do it to save his wife.
Okay...we got way more rich exposure to what the experience was like for Petey. Why aren't Mark and his sister having reflective conversations about the process??
I personally think that redirecting the whole tone towards a high stakes, life and death, time sensitive, urgent need to save Gemma's life forced too urgent a concrete plot into too underdeveloped a reality. The bread and butter of season 1 was not the mysterious cult world of Lumon, what was actually compelling about the show was the complex interpersonal dynamics, and in season 2, they sacrificed a shocking amount of interpersonal dynamics just to drive a high-stakes plot that made too little sense within the universe to even be that invested in it.
Saving Gemma could have been a several seasons long plot arc, IMO. In season 1, the whole concept of being severed was expensive and creative. In season 2, it mostly feels like a contrived barrier used a plot device that just exists to be overcome by our hero. I also think that the dynamic of innie and outie Mark not actually being aligned could have been a HUGELY interesting plot point that could have made up an entire season as they worked out the integration process.
The ethics of outie Mark even continuing with integration if innie Mark wasn't on board, and how to negotiate back and forth with yourself. Etc, etc. Just so much lost opportunity to continue to make severance an interesting thought experiment, rather than just a complication to get around to achieve *the big goal*.
It's just really, really hard for shows to pull off the transition from a brilliant, mysterious, world-building first season. But I truly think their pivot away from rich, well constructed interpersonal dynamics with a misstep.
