Severance and the Sabbath

One of the latest viral hits on streaming platforms is the show Severance, produced by Ben Stiller and starring Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken as well as a number of notable newcomers, including Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, and Zach Cherry. The premise of the show (which is rated TV-MA and includes foul language) is simple: “Severed” persons have their memories split between work and the rest of life. When severed workers go to their jobs, they effectively go to sleep while work versions of themselves wake up and go about their business. At the end of the work day, the work version goes to sleep and the outer version of the person wakes up.

It’s a simple concept, and one that might be familiar to many of us. Who among us at the beginning of a work day has not at one point fantasized about, or even prayed for, closing our eyes and waking up with the work day completed? One recent survey found that 46% of Gen Z respondents would like to be “severed” if such a procedure was possible.

But this idea becomes more disturbing and mind-bending as we consider and encounter the deeper implications. It is also a premise that is developed to narrative perfection in the show, as the dynamics between the outer persons, known colloquially as “outies,” and the inner workers, known as “innies,” progress. This show has a great deal of substance, including philosophical and even theological depth, as it leads the viewers to grapple with the meanings of life, death, work, rest, power, and love.

Think for a moment about the life of the “innies.” One day the innie wakes up for the first time. That’s essentially the innie’s birthday. But they have no memory of who they are, where they come from, how they grew up, or even what their name is. They retain knowledge of basic things like how to walk, eat, type, read, and speak. But the innies know precious little else. In this tightly controlled information environment, they are put to work on various tasks, some of which are quite esoteric, like that of the Macro Data Refinement (MDR) team.

The work of the MDR is to look at numbers on computers that look like 80s era Macintoshes and put groups of numbers in bins that evoke certain emotional reactions. For much of the show that’s all we really know about the MDR team’s work, that it is “mysterious and important.” But we also encounter other teams, like Optics & Design (O&D), who are tasked with, among other things, decorating the stark office environments with artwork, which mostly depicts events in the life of the severed company’s founders, the Kier family.

And here’s where much of the religious, and even cultish, dimensions of the show really come through. The company founded by the Kier family generations ago is called Lumon Industries, and the name is evocative of the themes of light and dark, enlightenment and illumination versus ignorance and backwardness. The innies, as well as their unsevered managers, are led to essentially worship the Lumon philosophy and the founding family. The innies know nothing other than what they are told and what they read in things like the employee handbook. The Kier family turns out to be a wealthy and powerful clan of crackpots. But this makes the situation of the severed workers, the innies as well as the outies, that much more dire and tragic.

Even without the specific narrative drama that is so engagingly portrayed in the series, the dilemma of the innies is compelling. One day you wake up and all you ever know is work. You are for all intents and purposes a slave, one who is seemingly irrevocably bound by space and time to a particular floor of an industrial building and who can do nothing but work. No rest, no vacation, no sick time, no love, no relationship—nothing but work and the most minimally humane social dimensions that a work environment might provide.

God created us to work. But he also created us to rest. As Jesus put it, “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Sabbath rest is a gift from God, and one without which our human lives would be impoverished, if not insufferable. Indeed, the severed floor becomes a manifestation of hell on earth, one in which the innies are trapped in a life of servitude. But even here the innate and created human nature designed to love one another proves unconquerable. At one point in the second season, one of the innies challenges the Lumon authorities: “They give us half a life and expect us not to fight for it.”

In depicting an existence of radical servitude without rest, a world of work without worship, and a life without love, Severance gives us an instructive lesson in what we ought to truly value and appreciate. Sometimes we only come to truly value something when it is absent. And we can also thank the Lord for unanswered prayers.