SNL 50 aired two nights ago, which has finally given me the motivation to write this. I can’t quite put my finger on why that is, but somewhere between Paul Simon and Sabrina Carpenter’s grandpa-granddaughter vibes and Bill Murray getting emotional during goodbyes, a feeling I’ve been wrestling with for a while seemed to crystallize. I have had a relationship with SNL for as long as any other show in my life. There’s something poetic in that.
For almost exactly a month, I have been having conflicting feelings about TV. While it’s an incredibly shameful thing to admit, television might be the most important thing in my life. I work in TV. When I’m not working, I watch a lot of TV. I’m constantly thinking about TV. I started writing about TV as an avenue for one of my favorite pastimes: talking about TV.
Those feelings have recently become slightly complicated. I still love TV, but I feel the way I think about it shifting. Today, I would like to attempt to explain that to you. Part of me believes that by writing this, I will be working through my relationship with the small screen, while another part thinks it may inspire you to examine your own feelings about TV—or anything else you’re passionate about. If this post gets weird and incoherent, please forgive me. The thoughts that have been racing through my mind in the last few weeks have been either the most pretentious or least pretentious of my life—I truly don’t know. The idea I’m going to try and explain is a smidge abstract, so if you read this and think it makes absolutely no sense, that’s totally fair. I ask that you hang in there (cheeky reference to Severance to show my incomparable wit) until my next post, which I promise will be more normal.
By the way, I am going to very minorly spoil Twin Peaks (both the original and The Return) and Lost, and very majorly spoil Severance today. Hope that’s cool with you.
About a month ago, David Lynch died. I’ll be honest—I had not seen most of his movies before he died, and I have not watched any since. I have spent a lot of time thinking about him, though. Lynch’s Twin Peaks is definitively one of the greatest shows ever made, and it has influenced many of the greats that have come since. Damon Lindelof, the creator of Lost and The Leftovers (and my favorite writer of all time), has spoken in the past about the influence Twin Peaks had on him. Its DNA can be found all over the TV world, including in several shows on the air today, with Severance chief among them. Not bad for a show that premiered thirty-five years ago.
When I first watched Twin Peaks, I wanted to know the answers. What is the Black Lodge? What’s up with the owls? Is that creamed corn in that kid’s hand? When I watched it again years later, I wanted to find the core truth of the show. Is there evil in all of us? Can we ever truly fix what is broken? What is worth saving? When I watched it yet again years after that (I know, I have to start going outside), I was left wanting nothing. I had the answers. Why was Audrey randomly dancing in the diner? Why did Leland’s hair turn white? What year is it? I don’t know, but I know how I felt watching it. People have tattooed the word “surrealist” all over Twin Peaks. If I were to attempt to explain my TV midlife crisis to you in a sentence, it would be this: Surrealist is just a word. The feeling is what matters, not the smart-sounding words you use to explain it.
So that is what I have been wrestling with recently. I love to talk about TV, to break it down and dissect it, but I believe that doing so sometimes misses the point. There is pain and wonder and beauty in simply sitting in the feeling you get from watching a show. Some of the greatest feelings I have had in my life were shared only by me and my television screen (is that sad?). I find myself at a crossroads. I want to engage with the shows I love in the way that best suits them, but I also can’t show up to work and be like, “Did you enjoy the indescribable feeling you got from Helly R. and Mark S. talking in the bathroom on Severance last night?” If I did that, people would think I was insane. I don’t have a solution to this. The balance between these two ways of connecting with TV is still unclear to me. I want to put a name to the feeling without losing it entirely, but right now, I just don’t know how.
My TV midlife crisis has been at the forefront of my mind, especially on Thursday nights. I was season-four-of-Succession-level excited for the return of Severance. The first season of Apple TV’s sci-fi hit was a truly remarkable work that checked every box: top-tier performances, an exciting and fresh visual language, Lynchian mystery laced with modern-day commentary. While its second season has sustained—and, in some cases, surpassed—the achievements of the first, something in Severance is hitting my ear wrong. Through the first few episodes, I couldn’t quite pin down what I was bumping against, but I think my issue with this new season is very much in line with the pending philosophical shift in my TV psychology: Severance wants me to care about the answers.
Don’t get me wrong—this show is still an incredible achievement. The returning cast have somehow stepped up their game from its previously high level, and they have managed to raise the stakes of the show while refusing to narratively tread water. In fact, I think that is the problem. We are being given too much. In the first season, we were shown incredibly weird stuff a couple of times per episode, and before we had time to ask about it, we were back with Irving and Burt as they found wholesome love in a sterile environment. In my opinion, that is where the show shined brightest. There could be waffle parties and conspiracies about departments having pouches, but at the end of the day, it was a story about people. Sometimes this feels hard to explain, so perhaps I’ll use an example. Let’s talk about the weirdest, most surreal Severance mystery of all: the goats.
When our heroes attempt to investigate the goats this season, our understanding of the role of barnyard animals on the show is expanded—albeit minimally. They find an indoor meadow, dozens of goats, and a gaggle of Lumon employees. In terms of small-scale Severance mysteries, this one was near the top. I had been dying to see more of those goats. Yet I felt nothing.
On the other hand, there is no word for the feeling in my chest when I first saw Mark S. and Helly R. find a man in a suit nursing a baby goat, insisting that they were “not ready.” I don’t feel a need to reach for that word. I felt it. You probably felt it too. It was a brilliant moment, but it didn’t feel vital. It unnerved all of us, and then we went right back to watching the four members of MDR grow closer and more aligned. Severance delivered an electrifying moment and then allowed the viewer to appreciate the negative space around it.
Is this simply a case of expectation being the thief of joy? Maybe. I would posit, however, that the issue at play here is a bit more complicated. The goats in season one were a flourish of mystery, while in season two, they felt like a clue. What dawned on me after this episode is that there is no explanation for the goats that will feel satisfying. To me, the only interesting thing about the goats is simply that I did not expect these corporate offices to contain goats. Knowing why or how they got there cannot possibly live up to the “what the fuck” moment their introduction provided.
Maybe this seems pessimistic or like an underestimation of the creatives behind Severance, but I would like to turn your attention to another show that ran into this very situation—the 2000’s classic Lost. Towards the end of Lost‘s six-season run, many of these smaller, goats-level mysteries were answered, most notably the whispers that characters would hear while they were alone in the jungle. In the final season, the whispers were explained, and it left me with a lingering question: who cares? The whispers are ghosts, I guess? I would have—and I believe you would have—been more satisfied if we never got an answer. All you would have is the feeling of seeing my boy Sayid running through the jungle, freaked out by those whispers. That feeling is more powerful than any explanation could have been.
Severance is a great show, and it has a chance to be an all-timer, but this quibble of mine speaks to what this show can be, not what it isn’t. This show should not be about Reddit detectives gleaning Easter eggs from screenshots—it should be focused on the wonderful ideas upon which it has built its emotional foundation. The fourth episode of this season (the gang goes glamping) featured some of the most brilliant character work on TV this decade, and in those moments, Severance shines. We are witnessing a show that wants to examine grief, love, and loneliness, and I will be watching Severance hoping for resolution on that—not on the meaning of those laminated cards my king, Dylan G., stole last season.
Writing this blog (I hate that word every time I write it) has been a great joy for me, and while it is nearly impossible to keep up with when I’m working, it has become an outlet that I enjoy and am constantly looking forward to developing. I still plan to break shows down in a more traditional sense going forward, but I think what I am trying (hopefully successfully?) to explain here is useful to keep in mind when you’re watching a show like Severance. I want to know what those weird dental tools were for as much as the next guy, but we enter dangerous territory when that is the thing looming largest in my mind. If this made sense to you, that’s great—I appreciate you reading all of this, and I hope you think about my TV midlife crisis in the future. If you found this to be the ravings of a TV-obsessed maniac, please keep in mind that I just tried to explain to you that we shouldn’t explain things—and consider whether you would do a better job.
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