Severance (TV Program)

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    ‘The Studio’ Ties Emmys Record for Most Comedy Nominations in a Season

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    Past winners like “Hacks” and “The Bear” lost some ground this year, making Apple TV+’s Hollywood satire starring Seth Rogen the one to beat.Season 1 of Apple TV+’s star-studded Hollywood satire “The Studio,” starring Seth Rogen as the beleaguered head of a fictional movie studio, became the comedy to beat on Tuesday for the 77th Emmy Awards, receiving 23 nominations.The nominations tie it with Season 2 of “The Bear” for the most-nominated season of a comedy series ever heading into the final voting round, which begins on Aug. 18. The award ceremony is scheduled for Sept. 14.Created by Rogen with his longtime creative partner, Evan Goldberg (along with Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez), “The Studio” seemed, in many ways, perfectly engineered to succeed. For a comedy, it is exceptionally ambitious and well made — beautifully shot and elaborately choreographed, with most scenes filmed as extended single takes, or “oners” in the insider parlance of the show.The show is also, as befits a series from the comedians behind “Superbad,” “Pineapple Express” and “Sausage Party,” very funny, taking aim at the pettiness of executive strivers, the boundless self-regard of celebrities and the industry threats posed by Big Tech and Wall Street. Rogen’s character must fight to preserve his artistic integrity amid the often humiliating demands of his corporate overlords.“It knows its business well enough to be blisteringly entertaining,” The New York Times’s chief TV critic, James Poniewozik, wrote in his review of the series in March, adding: “When ‘The Studio’ is funny, it is funnier than most anything on TV now.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Severance’ and ‘The White Lotus’ Dominate the Emmy Acting Nominations

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      The buzzy series are the early favorites in the drama category.TV buzz doesn’t always translate into Emmy nominations. But it did this year for “Severance” and “The White Lotus,” which have amassed rabid fandoms that gather online and in real life to dissect and celebrate the dramas.The second season of “Severance,” the mind-bending sci-fi workplace thriller on Apple TV+, earned 27 nominations on Tuesday morning, the most of any show this year. Nine of those went to its cast, including Adam Scott and Britt Lower for best lead actor and actress in a drama.Supporting nods went to Patricia Arquette, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman and John Turturro. Guest acting nominations went to Jane Alexander, Gwendoline Christie and Merritt Wever.Season 3 of “The White Lotus,” the darkly comic HBO drama that skewers self-absorbed luxury travelers, earned 23 nominations, including eight for its cast, which is mostly refreshed with each new season. This year, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Sam Rockwell, Natasha Rothwell and Aimee Lou Wood received supporting acting nominations. Scott Glenn was nominated for best guest actor in a drama.“Severance” and “The White Lotus” were both nominated for best drama. The other contenders are: “Andor,” “The Diplomat,” “The Last of Us,” “Paradise,” “The Pitt” and “Slow Horses.”Originally considered a limited series, “The White Lotus” cleaned up in that category at the 2022 Emmys, winning 10 awards, more than any other show, including best limited series. The show moved to the drama category for its second season.“Severance” and “The White Lotus” were not eligible for Emmys in 2024, and in previous years, they were mostly thwarted in the drama category by the former juggernaut “Succession.” With that series over and last year’s record-breaking drama “Shogun” out of contention this time around, there’s a good chance “Severance” and “The White Lotus” will be duking it out for the night’s biggest haul.The 77th Primetime Emmy Awards will be held on Sept. 14 in Los Angeles. CBS will broadcast the ceremony. More

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      The Best TV Shows of 2025, So Far

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      Returning hits like “Severance” and “The White Lotus” inspired plenty of chatter, but did they make our top TV list?The first half of 2025 saw the return of strike-delayed hit shows, like “Severance,” “The White Lotus” and “The Last of Us,” that took turns dominating the cultural conversation. But only one of them made our top TV list.Read on to find out which one and to see which other series, new and old, scripted and nonfiction, impressed our television critics the most (listed alphabetically).‘Andor’Diego Luna reprised his title role in the final season of “Andor.”Lucasfilm Ltd./Disney+A prequel series to “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016) — and arguably the most acclaimed “Star Wars” story of any kind since that film — “Andor” offered one of TV’s deepest explorations of the political realities and human costs of rebellion. Its two-season run wrapped up in May.“Prequels are often where dramatic tension goes to die,” James Poniewozik writes. “How invested can you be in a story whose outcome you already know? The genius of ‘Andor,’ created by Tony Gilroy, is to make that knowledge an asset.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Did a TV Show Hurt You? ‘Fix-Its’ Offer Justice

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      This article includes spoilers for “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance,” “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus.”As a longtime player of the Last of Us video game series, Sam Gaitan knew the death was coming. Still, the brutal murder of Joel in a recent episode of the HBO adaptation hit her hard. It was already midnight when she went on Tumblr to read fan reactions. Then, in a fit of inspiration, she started writing.“I was a wreck, and I needed to get those strong emotions out,” Gaitan, a tattooist and artist, said in a recent phone interview. By 5 a.m., she had written 3,761 words featuring Joel and Red, an original character Gaitan had previously created, and an alternative scenario that spares Joel from his onscreen fate.Writing under the alias oh_persephone, she posted the story on AO3, an online repository for fan fiction and other fan-created art, and crashed until her dogs woke her up the next morning.“It probably wasn’t the most coherent thing I’ve written,” she said, laughing. “But I figured other people could use it as much as I did.”In this alternative plot to “The Last of Us,” Joel, the beloved male lead played by Pedro Pascal, avoids being detained and murdered by a rival group.He is saved by Red, an invented heroine who convinces the gunmen that Joel is already dead and sends them off.“Joel’s eyes were on her, watching, a breath away from being up and ready to fight if needed,” oh_persephone writes. “They were both tightly wound coils, waiting to explode.”

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      ‘Severance’ Fans Celebrate Season 2 Finale With Lumon Industries Cosplay and Waffles

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      The sci-fi thriller “Severance” is about an enigmatic, cultlike company and its “severed” employees, whose brains have been surgically divided into an “innie” work consciousness and an “outie” home one. The show itself has a kind of bifurcated existence, becoming Apple TV+’s most popular series ever while inspiring fans in the non-TV world to spin fanciful theories — some of which have been borne out — and otherwise wallow in its imagery and mysteries.One of the most colorful examples of this happened at a venue in Kingston, N.Y., on Friday, as the series closed out its second season. The owners of two area restaurants that served as filming locations in the series, Phoenicia Diner and Eng’s, a Chinese restaurant in downtown Kingston, co-hosted a watch party for the season finale that included costumes, dance-offs, themed snacks and other “Severance”-related festivities.An unsevered photographer was inside to document all the choreography and merriment for The New York Times. Please try to enjoy each photo equally, and not show preference for any over the others.Held at Assembly, a venue in Kingston, the event included costume and dance contests and “Severance” souvenirs, like finger traps and Lumon Industries badges.Phoenicia Diner, seen in the show as a restaurant called Pip’s, offered attendees their own waffle parties.Goats, one of the most beloved bits of “Severance” iconography, were well-represented.Attendees paid tribute to characters including Lorne, the goat minder, and Miss Huang, the young deputy manager.Unlike in “Severance,” attendees were allowed to remember their innies’ experiences.Audience Report is a series that looks at people looking. Produced by Jolie Ruben and Amanda Webster. More

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      ‘Severance’ Finale: Which Theories Were Correct?

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      Some fans correctly predicted some of the episode’s biggest revelations. But other mysteries remain, and many more were introduced.This article is almost entirely made up of spoilers.The “Severance” rabbit hole online is deep, with fans sharing theories about the meaning of the notes used for elevator dings, the true nature of the Lumon Industries office (is it actually a hospital?) and other arcana. Would any of them pay off in the Season 2 finale?Yes, as it turned out. In fact, one of the most popular predictions prevailed in the explosive episode: The numbers Mark S. had been diligently sorting on his terminal were indeed the building blocks of his wife Gemma’s mind. With every file he completed, a new consciousness — or “innie” — of hers was created to be tortured on the testing floor.The effort culminated in Cold Harbor, his 25th and final file, which Mark S. completed as part of a greater scheme and collaboration between his innie and outie to free her.This work, which relied on Mark S.’s gut instinct, was — as Harmony Cobel confirmed — tied to “the four tempers,” a philosophy developed by the Lumon founder Kier Eagan: woe, frolic, dread and malice. Hats off to the “Severance” enthusiasts who saw that coming!And while the big Cold Harbor revelations will satiate devotees for a moment, many other questions remain, and many more were introduced.Yes, we learned that the goats serve some sort of ceremonial and sacrificial purpose. “This beast will be entombed with a cherished woman whose spirit it must guide to Kier’s door,” the Lumon fixer Mr. Drummond tells Lorne, of the Mammalians Nurturable department, as he hands her a bolt gun to kill the animal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Severance’ Finale: Which Fan Theories Were Correct?

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      Some fans correctly predicted some of the episode’s biggest revelations. But other mysteries remain, and many more were introduced.This article is almost entirely made up of spoilers.The “Severance” rabbit hole online is deep, with fans sharing theories about the meaning of the notes used for elevator dings, the true nature of the Lumon Industries office (is it actually a hospital?) and other arcana. Would any of them pay off in the Season 2 finale?Yes, as it turned out. In fact, one of the most popular predictions prevailed in the explosive episode: The numbers Mark S. had been diligently sorting on his terminal were indeed the building blocks of his wife Gemma’s mind. With every file he completed, a new consciousness — or “innie” — of hers was created to be tortured on the testing floor.The effort culminated in Cold Harbor, his 25th and final file, which Mark S. completed as part of a greater scheme and collaboration between his innie and outie to free her.This work, which relied on Mark S.’s gut instinct, was — as Harmony Cobel confirmed — tied to “the four tempers,” a philosophy developed by the Lumon founder Kier Eagan: woe, frolic, dread and malice. Hats off to the “Severance” enthusiasts who saw that coming!And while the big Cold Harbor revelations will satiate devotees for a moment, many other questions remain, and many more were introduced.Yes, we learned that the goats serve some sort of ceremonial and sacrificial purpose. “This beast will be entombed with a cherished woman whose spirit it must guide to Kier’s door,” the Lumon fixer Mr. Drummond tells Lorne, of the Mammalians Nurturable department, as he hands her a bolt gun to kill the animal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Was That Strange Asian Child Doing in the ‘Severance’ Office?

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      This season introduced Miss Huang — and used her as a visual shorthand for a longstanding American anxiety.Pity the American office worker: overworked, undervalued and kept in the dark about the true intentions of his employer, which are somehow weirder and more odious than he could possibly know. The beauty of the corporate-culture satire “Severance” lies in just how universal, how quotidian, its protagonist’s gripes are. On some cosmic level, Mark Scout wants to investigate the aims of his mysteriously tight-lipped company. Day to day, though, he must slog away at unsatisfying and impenetrable tasks, browbeaten by a series of cold, uncaring bosses. Who hasn’t been there?This season made a curious new addition to that line of Big Bad Bosses — a puzzle-box of a character, more loaded with menace than any of the middle managers who came before. Introduced, without fanfare, in the season’s premiere, “Miss Huang” is a steely Asian girl who, despite not looking old enough to enter PG-13 movies on her own, is apparently responsible for managing Mark and his adult colleagues. “Why are you a child?” someone asks, to which she only replies: “Because of when I was born.” Miss Huang is given no further explanation. She orders employees around, unsmiling, in her prim adolescent voice and middle-schooler knee socks, then plays with a hand-held water-ring-toss toy at her desk, all the more chilling for her lack of justification.But we are meant to make some assumptions. Miss Huang is orderly, diligent, quick-witted. She shows not a pinch of personality, so her talents must lie in sheer intelligence or efficacy. We can infer by her position that she has excelled beyond her years in some way — that she is precocious, perhaps even a prodigy. Standing quietly in the corner, eyeing the staff, she occasionally looks forlorn, a kind of executive waif, yet the overall effect is of sinister vigilance. You suspect coiled ambition, backstabbery in waiting. “When I played her, I didn’t feel very scary,” the actress Sarah Bock said in an interview. “But at the end of the day, crew members would come up to me like: ‘You freaked me out. You’re terrifying.’”The threat Miss Huang poses is more spectral.Watching this strange corporate poppet float around all season long, injecting scenes with an aura of ominous efficiency and little else, I kept having the thought that I knew her, somehow.And we have seen Miss Huang before — shades of her, at least. We have seen her in model students like Sanjay Patel on “Modern Family,” Cho Chang in “Harry Potter” (a Ravenclaw, naturally) and all the nameless TV Asian kids who effortlessly win spelling bees or chess tournaments. We have seen the top-of-their-class Asian doctors of “Grey’s Anatomy,” “House” and “E.R.” We have seen punchlines of ultracapability like “Asian Annie” on “Community” — the only person able to usurp the already-overachieving white Annie — or the high-ponytailed Joy Lin on “Girls,” who gets picked for a job over Lena Dunham’s Hannah because, while less personable, she knows how to use Adobe Photoshop. There is the corrupt accountant Lau in “The Dark Knight,” to whom Gotham’s mob bosses outsource their money laundering because he is “good with calculation,” and the geneticist Dr. Henry Wu, whose brilliance unleashes the hell of “Jurassic Park.” These are all wildly different characters in wildly different entertainments, but their Asianness is deployed to the same effect: as a shorthand for intellectual ability and über-proficiency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Severance’ Actress Who Plays Natalie On Those ‘Terrifying’ Scenes

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      “That’s the great thing about being an adult,” says Sydney Cole Alexander, who plays Natalie, the liaison with a wide smile and a cold gaze on the hit workplace thriller.As Natalie, a devoted spokeswoman for the shadowy Lumon Industries on “Severance,” Sydney Cole Alexander has an exacting morning routine. It starts with that tightly coiled updo.Ben Stiller, one of the Apple TV+ drama’s executive producers, “has a reputation for being very particular about hair,” Alexander said. After she was cast in the series, which follows workers who sign up for a procedure that bifurcates their personal and professional lives, she sat for a camera test. Stiller had asked her to repurpose the freeze-dried smile she flashed in a Crest commercial she’d booked the same day as “Severance,” and she encouraged him to let Natalie, the headset-wearing “conduit to the gods,” as she puts it, go blonder.“Every curl on my head was curled,” Alexander recalled. “And I just thought it was so Lumon, because that would take forever. I think it helped me to think about: What is this woman’s morning like? How committed is she to perfection and this company, and representing them perfectly?”In Season 2, which had its finale on Friday, the facade slips momentarily in a charged, nearly wordless exchange when Natalie presents Seth Milchick, a Black department chief and fellow Lumon true believer, with “inclusive” paintings from a tone-deaf board. “I did feel a little bit of sympathy with Milchick, which I think is terrifying for her,” said Alexander, who is biracial. “Because this is her prize, that she’s not sympathetic; it’s why she’s so good at her job.”In a video interview this month from her Brooklyn apartment, Alexander opened up about another dream role, the Jim Carrey movie that gets her choked up, her incurable sweet tooth and more. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Vintage ShoppingAs a teenager in New York City, a social activity was going to Beacon’s Closet or No Relation. I started furnishing my apartment with vintage things. There’s something so fun about the story of an item and that something can last, not even decades, but centuries.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More