Severance is probably the best show on television. And I only say “probably” because I can’t possibly watch everything on television for the sake of comparison.

Is there already an online backlash beginning to develop among would-be hipsters? Of course. It must follow as the night the day, as Shakespeare put it, the backlash following anything good becoming popular. Ignore it. The are stronger and weaker episodes, as with every series, but overall the level of excellence is astonishing.

Now nearly through its second season on Apple TV+, with the final episode available on March 21, Severance continues to dazzle. The show’s elective “severance” procedure involves an operation on the brain that cleaves the “work” consciousness from that of the individual’s personal life, so that neither part knows anything further about the other. In theory, this allows people to enjoy their lives unaware of the drudgery of their working hours, while their work selves are mentally clear to focus on their jobs. In reality, the workers are prison labor in unusually sleek surroundings, psychologically tortured to keep them in line.

Created by Dan Erickson, whose own suffering in corporate jobs inspired the series, and produced and mostly directed by Ben Stiller, this sci-fi combo of paranoid thriller and dark office comedy is so well executed that the bleakness of its subject matter is offset by the vigor of its style and construction. Film noir from the mid-century achieved the same effect, consistently presenting a view of modern American hell with such verve, it became a perverse pleasure to stare into such a chillingly pertinent representation of the abyss.

The series’ popularity suddenly exploded after the launch of Season 2, with record-breaking numbers signing up to watch it — so that it’s now the most-viewed show in the history of Apple TV+, beating even the beloved comedy Ted Lasso.

It seems people are even beginning to use Severance-based slang, referring readily to their “Innie” and “Outie” selves.

It’s become enough of a cultural phenomenon that Ross Douthat, a columnist at the New York Times, felt the need to come to grips with the show’s popularity and wrote a piece entitled “What Is ‘Severance’ About?” He genuinely puzzles over it for paragraphs, pondering for example, whether the series will turn out to be essentially anticlimactic and meaningless after a long buildup of red herrings, based on a parallel he perceives between the show’s unexplained goat-breeding room in the sinister biotech firm Lumon Industries and the periodic appearances of the polar bear in Lost.

But then, it figures that Douthat, being a conservative, wouldn’t recognize that an insightful series about a corporate workplace dystopia could be so compelling to so many people. Being preoccupied by hellish labor conditions is generally a left-wing thing. But even after decades of movie and television representations of evil corporations, villainous bosses, and nightmarish workplace scenarios of all kinds, it’s clear that an astute new variation will still be riveting to the general population.

There are those who say the series is a post-COVID-19 pandemic phenomenon, because the lockdown estranged workers from their workplaces. And no doubt that experience has added a frisson of extra horror to the endless depictions of the corporate world as fundamentally cold, creepy, exploitative, and dehumanizing.

On top of all that, the US citizenry now has billionaire corporate CEO and all-around asshat Elon Musk acting as an unelected copresident with Donald Trump, sending his Department of Government Efficiency minions rampaging through federal agencies undermining the functioning of key social services as well as tanking the economy for obscure reasons of their own. So we have no problem recognizing the strangely outsize power of corporate bosses whose sickening abuses routinely destroy working-class people in Severance.

Season 2 of the series explores more the psychological twistedness of the bosses at Lumon Industries as well as the mysterious and maniacal philosophy behind their most egregious crimes against their workers. This is inevitable given where Season 1 left off, which was a breakthrough point when the four-employee team making up the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department — conciliatory leader Mark S. (Adam Scott), straitlaced Lumon-worshipping Irving B. (John Turturro), sardonic Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) who nevertheless tends to suck up to the bosses, and recalcitrant newcomer Helly R. (Britt Lower) — engage in a long-overdue worker revolt. They figure out how to temporarily overcome the severing of their consciousnesses in order for worker “Innies” to experience the lives of their “Outies” in the world beyond the Lumon building.

The biggest reveal about the Outie life of Helly R., the most fervent anti-Lumon rebel at work, is that she’s actually Helena Eagan. That is, she’s the daughter of Lumon CEO Jame Eagan and direct descendent of the revered nineteenth-century founder of the company, Kier Eagan, and the current, ruthlessly committed heiress apparent of the company. She only underwent the severance procedure in order to spearhead a publicity campaign for Lumon Industries.

But first, a recap is probably necessary. Also a spoiler alert, if you haven’t seen Season 1. (What are you waiting for?)

The dominant narrative of Severance Season 1 involves the volatile efforts of management and coworkers to integrate new employee Helly R. into the oppressive corporate life of Lumen Industries. Helly R., a fearless and healthy-minded redhead, just isn’t having it. From the moment she wakes up as a total amnesiac on the long table in the conference room, which is where each new employee arrives after going through the severance process, Helly R. is engaged in a fierce combination of fight and flight, trying to get out of there.

She pounds on every exit door, flees down hallways, hurls office implements at the coworkers she regards as her jailers. When none of that works, she tries superficial cooperation, submitting a formal resignation through office channels. Resignation request denied. She attempts stealth, trying to smuggle forbidden notes to her Outie urging her never to come back inside this place.

Finally, her Outie is shown to her in a recording, telling her that the choice has already been made, and that she has to stop thinking of herself as someone with autonomy. “You are not a person,” Helena tells Helly coldly. From that point on, Helly is seeking the means to destroy alter-ego Helena by any means necessary, up to and including threatening to slice her own fingers off with an office paper cutter if she’s not released from Lumon’s “severed floor” — because after all, they’re also Helena’s fingers.

The acme of her efforts is an attempt to hang herself, a suicide attempt that doubles as a way to murder Helena. Helly stages it inside the elevator where severed employees undergo the transition that erases from recent memory all the time they spent outside Lumon Industries. As far as the Innies know, the elevator doors close on them at 5:15 p.m. and open again almost immediately at 9:00 a.m. They’re never not at work.

The main series protagonist is Mark S., or Mark Scout in the Outie world. He’s so grief-stricken by the loss of his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) in a fatal car accident that he regards severed life as a boon — at least part of him gets to escape his agony, while the rest of him goes on suffering. We see his Outie sobbing in his car in the Lumon parking lot, before transforming in the elevator into an all-too-cooperative Innie who smiles blankly and normalizes the bizarre management style of his immediate supervisor, omnipresent manager Mr Milchick (Tramell Tillman) of the MDR department, and his icy boss, floor manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette). They in turn answer to “the Board,” a faceless entity that communicates — barely — via office telecom.

Mark S. is briefly disturbed by the loss of his work friend Petey (Yul Vazquez), when he’s suddenly informed, without explanation, that Petey “is no longer with Lumon Industries,” a chilling phrase that sounds like a death sentence — and it actually does mean the death of an Innie. But at the same time, Mark is promoted to Petey’s old job as head of the four-person MDR group. Mollified, he very quickly sets about doing first the task assigned, trying to integrate Helly R. into his small team. The team also includes the stiffly correct Irving B., who worships all things Lumon, especially founder Kier Eagan. But Irving is older than the others and inclined to fall asleep on the job, an involuntary transgression that’s punished by a dreaded trip to “the Break Room,” where a form of psychological torture is practiced to extract confessions and abject apologies from erring employees.

And the fourth is Dylan G., who’s sardonic about corporate life with fellow employees and a total suck-up to his bosses, always working assiduously at the department’s mysterious data-cleansing job so he can rack up more Lumon rewards such as finger traps in the MDR department’s signature blue. He’s working his way up to the waffle breakfast that’s considered a high-value perk for only the most deserving employees.

The disappearance of Petey and the struggles with Helly set off ripples that lead to the whole team getting embroiled in edgy behaviors that’ll bring the hammer down on them in Season 2. For example, straitlaced Irving gets drawn into a forbidden office romance with Burt G. (Christopher Walken) of the Optics and Design (O&D) department, which turned out to be a fan-favorite plot development in the series.

All of which brings us to Season 2, which picks up five months later as Mark S. awakens after the worker revolt is quashed and finds disturbing changes at Lumeo. Floor manager Harmony Cobel is “no longer with Lumon Industries,” making Mr Milchick the new floor manager. He’s adopted a new “softer” approach in management style, which involves praising the “Lumon rebels” for pushing for much-needed corporate reforms. There’s even a crudely animated film about their heroism and all the changes at Lumon Industries, which involve openness and transparency and responding to worker requests.

Which is all very well except for one thing — nobody will tell him where his team is. Irving B., Dylan G., and Helly R. are all missing, and there’s a new MDR team sitting at their four-module combination desks in the middle of the huge windowless office space. It’s one of the great comical yet grimly realistic moments in the show, when Mark S. walks into his office and finds three new and completely unrecognizable coworkers sitting where his friends used to be. There’s even one with his name, Mark W. (Bob Balaban), who asks if Mark S. would be willing to go by a different name “to avoid confusion.”

Having actors like Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat show up in what are essentially cameo roles indicates the “cool factor” Severance has achieved. The main, recurring, and guest casts are astonishingly good and accomplished.

This uncanny scene featuring new workers at old worker desks demonstrates the absolute fungibility of corporate workers, who can always be replaced with new cogs in the wheel without interrupting the relentless business of the corporate entity — though in the case of Lumon Industries, it’s not clear what that business might be. The MDR department sits at desktop computers looking at screens full of numbers until they recognize numbers that appear “scary.” They cull and bin those numbers. That’s it. That’s their entire job.

Which is not much of a sci-fi reach, that job description. My godson worked at Tesla, Inc. for a while, Elon Musk’s car company that’s now tanking worldwide, and I’m proud to say he led a groundbreaking effort to unionize the Tesla Buffalo branch, before he and all the other unionizers were laid off. But until that happened, his job was to endlessly click on and identify what was contained in various on-screen images, sort of like those “I am not a robot” tests online that ask you to choose all the images that have streetlights in them or something. It was, ironically, a way to train the company’s AI system in object recognition.

Mark S., however, refuses to accept the loss of his former team. And for mysterious reasons, Mark’s wishes are being catered to as long as he’s working on “refining” the data categorized under the name “Cold Harbor.” Lumon management conspires to keep him happy until that landmark date of completion, which is looming, for reasons we don’t yet know, even to the point of arranging to give him something else he desires — which is Helly R.

This is arranged during one of the greatest episodes in Season 2, called “Woe’s Hollow.” That’s the remote, snowbound site where Mark’s reunited team abruptly find themselves stranded, supposedly because Mr Milchick is responding to their request to be able to go outdoors occasionally, a typical punitive act of corporate passive-aggression. It’s both ludicrous and scary, which is the combo the show specializes in, and a perceptive one if you want to evoke our current reality. MDR team members dressed in tall Russian-style fur hats topping off their elaborate winter outfits come to consciousness and start shouting desperately at each other across vast stretches of icy tundra, trying to figure out where they are and what they should do to survive without apparent food, shelter, or sources of heat.

Always sharply dressed Mr Milchick finally arrives, wonderfully kitted out in all-white, fur-trimmed outerwear, to help them find their heated pods and food supplies and clue them in to their educational mission, retracing the steps of Lumonn founder Kier Eagan on a crucial trip he once took with his twin brother. Mr Milchick also gives them sinister warnings such as the typically faux-religious Lumon adage, “Stray not from Kier’s path / lest you roil nature’s wrath.”

That terrible poetry is a good example of the various Kier Eagan–related sayings distilled from his nineteenth-century philosophy that is woven into the workings of Lumon Industries. It’s one of the best parts of the series, the way the history of the corporation is depicted. Of course, now people get a bit sentimental about that old philanthropic approach of corrupt tycoons, for understandable reasons. At least people got libraries and schools and art galleries and some very nice public buildings.

It’s just one of many ways Severance recognizes the grotesque, religion-addled, ideologically driven hell on Earth we’ve created in the American workplace — finding the common thread running from the oligarchs of the robber-baron era to today. Let’s revel in this rare excoriating satire while we can!