Sometimes there are shows — and books, and movies, and so forth — that are so seemingly up my alley that it takes me a while to get around to them. A TV show that combines office drama, conspiracies, critiques of corporate in loco parentis, minimal-effects science fiction, and midcentury sets, and the cast of which includes Dichen Lachman, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken, seemed almost too good to be true. (I don’t watch a lot of comedy, so pretty much the only thing I’d seen the show’s star, Adam Scott, in previously was Big Little Lies, which I didn’t even connect him to until I pulled up his IMDB profile.) The show in question, Severance, is not too good to be true; it is as good as it might seem to be based on the ingredients, which is quite good. I’ve just finished season one, and am very much enjoying the occasional musical cues, the interstitial music by Theodore Shapiro, and the sound design of the various imagined technologies. In the episode of this makeshift screenshot, the winner of an office competition gets to choose the music to be played at a party. The character selects — appropriate to said character’s character — “defiant jazz,” emphasis on “defiant,” and indeed defiance is precipitated. I hope someday we get to hear the “spooky ambient,” though that could simply be Shapiro’s score.
