‘Severance’ Asks: What if We’re Not Paranoid Enough?

As the second season of “Severance,” the lavishly surreal series on Apple TV+, comes to an end, faithful viewers may be left with an unshakable unease. The show is about many things — work, grief, elaborate cut-fruit buffets — but this season proved especially interested in the unsettling notion that you can never truly know the people you love the best and trust the most and that some of them may actually mean you harm.

Now is a time of great paranoia, and an ambient feeling of distrust is being manifested in the streets, at the polls and on our screens. Spy films and secret-identity thrillers have long been genre staples, but the recent crop, including “Severance,” is conspicuously concerned with a particular anxiety: the creeping fear that you can never truly know anyone, possibly including yourself.

“Severance” follows a quartet of employees at a mysterious company who’ve had their consciousness split into two identities: innies, the people they are at work, and outies, the people they are everywhere else. If its first season was an extended, absurdist riff on the notion of work-life balance — the outies carried on obliviously while their innies were consigned to a fluorescently lit, purgatorial office — the second season expanded the show’s concerns to explore the ways in which people often aren’t who they seem or profess to be.

Some innies were covert outies, while some outies were at war with their innies. In one story line, a woman cheated on her husband with his innie. One of the season’s great reveals — spoiler alert if you haven’t yet watched the whole thing — involved the emotional fallout when the main character, Mark S., realized he’d had an intimate encounter with a woman he thought was his office romance but was, in fact, the malevolent future head of the company. (Thanks to the mechanics of the show, those two people inhabit the same body.)

All this reflects our national dilemma, in which we’re experiencing our own kind of bifurcated daily reality. We seem fated to follow every election from now on by looking across the partisan divide and wondering: Who are you? And how could you? We don’t trust each other. We don’t even believe we know each other. Maybe you thought you knew your kindly next-door neighbors until one day they unfurled a MAGA flag on their front lawn. Or perhaps you thought you knew who President Trump was until he decided to gut the Department of Veterans Affairs or threaten to annex Canada.

It’s a destabilizing realization — that people who once thought they were involved in a common project, informed by common ideals, are living in different realities. And there don’t seem to be any ready political remedies. While we muddle through, there’s a fascination and perhaps even a comfort in seeing these anxieties reflected in the fun house mirror of our entertainment.