🏢🍿 Severance

A series. At a company called Lumon, some employees have had a procedure that splits their memory in two: the self who works knows nothing of life outside, and the self who goes home knows nothing of the work. One team on one very white floor begins to wonder what exactly they are sorting, and for whom.

Jonas Reuter put this on with a frozen pizza on the evening of 14 February, at the end of the worst week of the winter, and asked no questions. We watched it on Fridays from then until 21 March, one or two episodes at a time, which makes it the television of the launch.

The premise is a joke about work-life balance taken literally, and I was the ideal audience: that week I would have paid for the procedure. By episode three I had changed my mind. The people on the severed floor never rest. For them every lift door opens straight onto the next working day. What the series understands is that the part of you that does the work also needs to have had the evening.

• The office is the best thing in it. Jonas wants the corridors. I want the absence of a single cable.
• The rewards for good work are a finger trap, a caricature portrait and five minutes of music. I have sat in recognition programmes with less self-knowledge.
• The numbers they sort are never explained. They are grouped by how they feel. This is closer to backlog triage than I would like.

Why only four stars: it withholds answers past the point where withholding is a style, and the last episode stops at the top of a breath.

The 💳 Film streaming subscription existed for this and nothing else. Once we had finished we never opened it again, which the Sunday money check found out in April.

Friday log

• 21 March. Finished. Diagnosis in the morning, finale at night. Jonas talked about the corridors for ten minutes and I let him.
• 7 March. Four days to launch. One episode, and I was asleep before the end of it. Jonas says I did not miss the good part, which means I did.
• 28 February. Two episodes. I have started saying good morning to Priya in the lift in a flat voice. She has not seen it.
• 14 February. Episode one, frozen pizza. People who never take their work home. Nobody mentioned what day it was.

• The first morning on the table: the cleanest opening of anything I saw this year.
• The break room. One apology, read until it is believed.
• The last forty minutes of the series, which should be watched without a phone in reach.