Awesome Severance

Severance season two is over now, and we have to wait at least a year to find out what happens next to our favorite Innies. In the meantime, enjoy this remake of the show’s opening credits, in the style of Parks and Recreation courtesy of editor Inherent Mediocre. It makes you wonder if Ben Wyatt is just an alternate consciousness of Mark Scout.

Imagine for a moment that Lumon acquired Dunder Mifflin. Luís Azevedo of Little White Lies put together this brilliantly edited parody that envisions the Scranton paper company’s employees as innies struggling to understand their place in the world and the meaning of the mysterious work they do with numbers. Now enjoy some Merriment and Choreography.

Mysterious and surreal TV series like Severance, Devs, and Maniac sometimes lead us down endlessly weird rabbit holes. Comedian Alasdair Beckett-King pokes fun at such convoluted storylines that may or may not lead anywhere and may never answer our questions. We’re looking at you, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof.

Despite its seeming simplicity, Theodore Shapiro’s theme music from Severance packs a punch. Not only is it memorable, it does a great job capturing the show’s sense of mystery. Artificial Fear added their flair to the track with a version that starts like the original, but builds to a crescendo thick with electric guitar and distortion effects.

When outies become innies in the elevator in Severance, they go through a trippy transformation process. Gav from The Slow Mo Guys shows us how its possible to replicate the visual effect using a motion control rig and a motorized zoom lens. It’s basically a modified version of the dolly zoom that’s been used to create unsettling visuals since Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Severance fans will love this mini replica of the computer the Macrodata Refinement team uses. Matthew Lim created a 3D-printed shell for the terminal and loaded it with a Raspberry Pi 5 and a small touchscreen to display Lumon’s mysterious number grouping game. You can grab the STL files and bill of materials to make your own on Patreon.

It’s been rumored that Season Two of Severance will feature some big celebrity cameos. It turns out that Late Show host Stephen Colbert has already been on the show, but the scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. Perhaps it’s because his innie thought he was working at Dunder-Mifflin instead of Lumon.