The feel-bad watch of the year is finally here—Severance season 2 has arrived, possibly the only Apple TV show anyone actually watches. The workers of the severed floor are as bored and tortured as they were before, but this time they’ve had a taste of the outside world. They’re in a place of ‘first week of work after Christmas vacation.’ As people who’ve just experienced January and are bravely marching forward into February, we feel for them.
Severance runs on dread, but it’s heart is all office sitcom. Helly and Mark S. are so Jim and Pam, sorry, down to her red hair and his snarky little smirk. There’s something so comforting about a workplace TV show—even the Sopranos fits the bill. Colleagues who share spaces, resentments, and power struggles can be more familiar to us than families. In America, we support the professional realm than the personal. Good luck booking that universal pre-K you speak of! But we’d loooove for you to return to the office so you can be in adult pre-K coralling the scary numbers, we’re family here honey.
Can you tell that I’m rambling? This is sort of a filibuster-on-the-page moment. As a recent January experiencer, my new year’s resolutions did drive me here—I didn’t exactly resolve to write as much as I resolved to do things repeatedly and consistently. And loose little blogs are easy money in the space of repetition. So we press on.
Anything office-centric always brings me back to Mad Men. Probably my favorite show of all time, easily the best professional-meets-personal show of all time. Don was himself a severed sort of guy, really early to the whole promise of Lumon. His entire identity as ‘Don’ was constructed as an escape, a bifurcation of his brain that allowed Dick to outrun his trauma in favor of a life as Don. It prepared him to split Don again and again—the office Don acting as a petty dictator while the home Don swanned in to be the good cop parent, the promiscuous Don slutting it up in Manhattan and the pious Don slut shaming Betty over her yellow bikini. He went through a personality shift every time he got in that elevator, wiping the slate clean to be come a new man at home only to find that when he got to the suburbs and opened the front door, he was still staring straight into the void.
David Lynch was a big fan of Mad Men. Tributes were everywhere after his death this week, but one of my favorites was the resurfacing of what Elisabeth Moss said of their meeting:
Also in wonderful Lynch quotes shared this week was this about Los Angeles:
As a current Philadelphia resident, I mostly agree. I do find that there’s a lot of love here when the Eagles are winning and the streets are charmingly cobblestone-ing and yadda yadda yadda but that doesn’t outweigh the endless grey abyss you’re met with when you try to access Philly from I-95. I miss the lightness and strangeness of LA all the time. It’s a place I can’t really live for a lot of very practical reasons—money, family, etc. But it’s the place I can romanticize the most, the home of my entire 20s. This week I’m trying to do what I can for LA from afar. Hunter Harris shared this spreadsheet of GoFundMe links via Personal Space—donate if you can to help people rebuild. Anything helps.
I am obsessed with Severance AND I think it's finally time for me to rewatch Mad Men.