I love all my friends and colleagues here at Aftermath, but part of loving someone is acknowledging they are not perfect. Take Nathan, for example. While he has beautiful, perfect hair, he also has a fatal flaw: he enjoys going online to read about TV shows.
One of those shows is Severance, and as we've already seen this week, there's a lot of Severance talk out there right now, much of it dogshit. But there's a lot of talk about all kinds of TV shows online these days, and like I've written previously, a lot of it ends in very angry and frustrated and unhelpful places. So I come to you all today to repeat the same advice I gave during True Detective's run: instead of going to Reddit or Twitter or the comments section of your favourite website to read a review about a TV show that's full of mystery but is also in the middle of a season, have you considered not doing that?
Severance, a show where none of us know what is going to happen, is not finished. Season two of Severance is a series of ten episodes (at time of publication we've had nine of them), continuing on from the first season and leading into others. Each episode in that season tells a story that is part of a wider, ongoing story. That's how stories work; they're told over time. It's unreal I'm spelling this baby shit out, yet as I look around social media and seemingly serious websites, here we are.
Week after week, the Discourse surrounding Severance simply cannot wait for that story to be told before leaping into the breach. We live on an internet where media and commentators routinely review each episode as though they are independent works, some even scoring them like blockbuster video game releases, a 7/10 in episode two simply not achieving the same level of visual fidelity and replayability as the 8/10 from episode five.
I'm not here to try to police your thoughts, to say you can’t talk about TV. From the safety of your own couch or office or private Discord, you should always talk with friends and loved ones about a TV show, your theories about what's going to happen, whatever. That's some of the fun of television, of shared fandom and community! I'm just saying: maybe keep those conversations within your closest circles. Don't bring them to the public internet, which in its current, ruinous state will poison them beyond all recognition.
The modern internet--particularly the algorithm-driven weaponization of commentary, and the accompanying decay of genuine criticism and online media--has eroded humanity's ability to discuss an in-progress TV series en masse. It has turned the serialisation of story-telling into an attempt by websites and talking heads to min/max our consumption of art. It has destroyed too many people's ability to simply watch something, to think something about it then get on with their lives.
Take last week's "divisive" episode, the eighth in the series, of Severance. An episode where a major character has their backstory completely upended, doubles our understanding of the show's villainous corporation and signposts the future arc of the series' resistance, all in just 37 minutes. Yet despite all that--and I honestly believe this has been caused by the media's click-driven, growing disregard for the beating heart of various artforms--too many websites went beyond just writing some thoughts about the episode, and decided to not only review it as though it was a 37-minute feature film, but make news about what some random people on the internet thought about it.
This obsession with the opinions of media illiterate viewers and per-episode reviews (as opposed to recaps, which are usually fine!) is so common now across all online spaces you may not even stop to survey the machine in its entirety anymore, but let's do that now for a second: do you realise how insane it is to do any of this?
Whether you think that episode was any good or not isn't even the point; the point is that websites and commentators performing critical services couldn't look past those 37 minutes to understand it was serving a purpose, and that trying to "review" it in isolation--or care what some random person on the internet thinks about it--is pointless. We simply won't know how effective episode eight will be until the series, or maybe even the whole show, is finished. If by the end of Severance this ultimately meant little, then sure, fire away. But if it turns out to be one of the most pivotal episodes of the entire show, and you called it boring at the time because it had "few thrills throughout", or thought it was important to tell your readers other people thought it was boring, it's not a great look.
Imagine if my review of a Yakuza game didn't finish the game first, to best consider the events that had unfolded over the last 100 hours, but had instead stopped once a week to write a short blurb that simply said "this bit was zzzzz, 5/10", "Kiryu didn't fight anyone, 6/10", or "not enough karaoke, eh, 5.10". I'd be booed out of this industry, and rightly so, because without context those snapshots would be meaningless. Yet that's what too many websites and popular critics, all members of a species that within just a few short years has forgotten entirely how to watch a weekly television show, are doing with shows like Severance.
Again, to be clear, I am not telling anybody to stop talking about television. But the specific type of television that Severance is, a serialised story that relies on mysteries being revealed and a story unfurling itself in slow motion, should be given the basic courtesy of letting that story be told before we start handing out verdicts, or polling the masses for their kneejerk reactions.
