The second season of the Apple TV+ smash-hit Severance booted back up again earlier this year, continuing the story of Mark Scout (Adam Scott), a widower who undergoes a drastic procedure to make the grieving process a little easier. When he clocks in at the beginning of his shift at Lumon Industries, he has no recollection of his personal life. All he knows is his workplace, a sentence that becomes deeply frustrating for him, but would potentially be a blessing for other TV characters.
The position itself, along with his supervisors — controlling manager, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), and her lackey-turned-successor, Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) — are certainly intimidating, to say the least. But working in the Macrodata Refinement Division isn’t all bad (when you’re not paying attention to the horrors underneath the surface…).
Mark is joined by a team of loyal coworkers, including recent hire Helly Riggs (Britt Lower), the ambitious Dylan George (Zach Cherry), and the most senior employee, Irving Bailiff (John Turturro). It’s the core four’s chemistry and camaraderie that makes working in an Orwellian nightmare just a little bit more bearable.
While Severance has been redefining the concept of the workplace, it is by no means the first TV series to explore the ins and outs of office culture. Here are some other workforces we wouldn’t mind sharing some water-cooler talk with, ranked by how badly we want to work there. As you can imagine, Lumon Industries will not be featured on this list. We prefer to keep our minds in one piece and out of the control of cultish corporate interests. Don’t you?
Severance, Fridays, Apple TV+