Severance - Season 1 (TV review)

★★★★★ I finally watched the first season of Severance. There isn’t a bad episode in the bunch. The slow burn from Helly waking up with no memory, through Mark finding out about their missing colleague, through the revelation in the season finale of who the rest of the Macro-Data Refinement team’s outside selves are (not to mention the wellness counsellor) is utterly gripping. And some of the curveballs really hurt. If you're not familiar with the premise, it's set in a high-security workplace that uses brain chips to permanently separate employees' in-office memories from their outside memories. What can I say about the absurdity of the Severed floor? No last names, giant open-floor-plan rooms with a handful of desks in the middle, bright lights everywhere except the hallways to places you really don’t want to go, a maze of empty, backrooms-like corridors keeping departments separate, an incentive structure that boils down to Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) for infantilized adult…