The Feast of Severance

Watching these shows, there’s a sense of someone whispering look what you made me do. They can’t decide whether their heroes are deluded assholes or low-key aspirational #goals. In some narratives, that sort of ambivalence is compelling; in these shows, it mostly feels hazy, like the ethical compass of the show itself is spinning wildly, demagnetiz

I’ve been watching (and mostly enjoying) the crop of scammer shows (The Dropout, Inventing Anna, WeCrashed) released over the last few months, all of which are in conversation with the past, with each other, with us as viewers, but also with this larger idea of what it takes to succeed in a post-Great Recession, rapid growth capitalism economy. The

Severnace is grappling with many of the same questions swirling around contemporary work and labor as those other shows, but it’s pursuing them in a way that’s at once thrilling and haunting.

Once you start looking for disassociation, it’s everywhere. It’s in the way we consume media, and how so much of what we consume is so targeted now, and you have to work hard to get another perspective, and we all spend time buying products that we know are not necessarily coming from an ethical place or arriving through an ethical process. But the