In June, Elon Musk, having grown fed up with the pandemic-era shift toward remote work, demanded that his employees spend forty hours a week in the Tesla office or risk expulsion. He hasn’t been the only captain of industry to protest the effects that the pandemic has wrought on work culture. Last year, the JPMorgan Chase C.E.O. Jamie Dimon declared that working from home wasn’t a viable option for “those who want to hustle.
“Industry,” which débuted in the fall of 2020, is the brainchild of Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, two Oxford alums who worked as low-level employees at an investment bank in their twenties. Neither was cut out for the environment, but they were keen enough observers of the social dynamics in the banking world to spin them into “Industry,” a show that glamorizes and condemns the financial sector in equal measure.
If “Industry” delights in the exhilaration of a boundary-free professional world, “Severance” exaggerates the flatness of a perfectly separated work-life arrangement. Lumon’s office is a barren wasteland of corporate cleanliness where employees, literally zapped of their personal dramas, can only find joy in the dumbest of pleasures, like a Chinese finger-trap toy or a new tote bag. And the work itself doesn’t exactly offer any kind of compensatory enrichment.
cbattan Gorgeous read 🤟🏾
cbattan Love seeing all these natural and organic “workers long for the good old days of nightmare commutes and cube farms” articles that keep springing up. Refreshing pov since literally no one in the real world feels this way.
cbattan Wait a minute, you think Severance taps into a yearning
cbattan Or maybe they are just new ideas in an ocean of retreads and spin offs.
cbattan I love the New Yorker but this is a silly take.
cbattan I like war movies b/c I want to go fight in wars too
cbattan Ha ha.
cbattan go wash your car with this bullshit
cbattan Yeah Severance really made me miss the office
cbattan Yes—working from home and getting my fill of dystopian office life on the teevee is *exactly* how it should be.
cbattan Did.. did you watch these shows?
cbattan Wow that's what you got from Severance?
cbattan If you think Severance was about how much being in an office rocks, I question your ability to understand television or even language