How Severance became the most uncanny, fascinating show on TV

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. But it’s hard to believe that Plato himself would’ve enjoyed any of these half as much as AppleTV+’s sensational Severance, which returns to screens this week, three years after it left viewers feeling as frustrated and clueless as its protagonists. This 20th-century innovation – so-called “existentialism” – inverted Plato’s maxim that “essence precedes existence”. Innies Helly and Mark Even though Severance is not a philosophical text to inspire the fashion choices of pretentious undergraduates, it is precision engineered to strike at viewers’ sense of themselves as humans. And then there’s what a third great philosopher, former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, would call the “unknown unknowns” and the “known unknowns”.