The Apple TV+ drama series Severance is back for its second season. It's a dystopian take on work-life balance — where characters have their personal and professional lives surgically separated. He spoke with Ann Marie Baldonado in 2022 about the making of the series. Also, Justin Chang reviews one of this year's most talked-about Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, No Other Land. It was directed by a collective of two Palestinian filmmakers and two Israeli filmmakers. Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. The hit drama series Severance, a sci-fi take on work-life balance, is now into its second season on Apple TV+, after a long hiatus. Today, we feature our interview with Adam Scott, who stars in it.
You may know him previously from his role in Parks and Recreation, playing Ben Wyatt, government worker and love interest for Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler. He also was in the series Big Little Lies and in the cult favorite Party Down. In Severance, as Mark S., he's a guy still grieving for his wife who died in a car accident years ago.
Unable to return to work as a professor because of his grief, he decides to work for the company Lumen, a mysterious conglomerate that performs a controversial surgery on some of its employees. Workers can choose to get a chip implanted in their brain that makes them forget about their personal lives when they're at work and their work lives when they're at home.
In the current season, there's some evidence that Mark's wife may not be dead after all, which only reinforces his desire to quit the company that severed his consciousness. But his sister Devin, played by Jen Tulloch, urges him to stay put and investigate further.
Devin, what are you doing? You remember I identified her, right?
Yes, Mark.
I saw her body. Yeah, I know.
My thing is, if we could just get like a half step more confirmation, then it's not gonna be something that continues to haunt us, you know what I mean? Us? Yes. She was my family too, Mark.
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