Ben Stiller’s New Series Is a Sci-Fi Take on Office Space

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/ben-stiller-severance.html

by CRConrad • 5 years ago

166 110 5 years ago

rektide• 5 years ago

Not quite as "down to earth" but I'm also pretty eager to see how Avenue 5's second season goes. Space cruise around the solar system goes sideways. Not as clearly Office Space inspired, but still a Great Snub style show.

jjulius2• 5 years ago

IRIS!!!

One of the funniest shows I've seen in a while, and a welcome laugh at the onset of the pandemic. Been waiting anxiously for the second season!

mchusma• 5 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation. Will check it out.

coryrc• 5 years ago

It's too "real" for me, like going to Target and watching the returns desk. More sad than funny.

aidenn0• 5 years ago

That's how I felt about "The Office"

GekkePrutser2• 5 years ago

Looks good, thanks for sharing. I'm not subscribing to Apple TV right now so I wouldn't have known about it

cinntaile• 5 years ago

Is it possible to subscribe without having an Apple device?

aplc0r• 5 years ago

It is. I had a subscription and used a Roku Ultra. However, I cancelled my subscription after every 4k stream buffered even on a gigabit connection. I watch 4k UHD content on every other service through the Roku without issue. So your mileage may vary.

cookie_monsta• 5 years ago

You can watch in the browser on any device but they don't make it easy. I had to set up an account then separately connect that to my iTunes account. There may have been something else - I can't remember. It felt very cumbersome, but I'm sure would be buttery if you were inside the garden.

I binged a few decent shows then cancelled before my 1 week trial was up. It's cheaper than most but has very little content (and the worst "search" function you've ever seen - maybe these are related).

dleslie• 5 years ago

Amazon Fire devices can install Apple TV.

Rebelgecko• 5 years ago

Yeah. I watch AppleTV shows on my computer (their web UI is sometimes janky but it works) and via Chromecast.

theshrike792• 5 years ago

Most TVs have the Apple TV+ application nowadays. Appeared on my LG TV last fall-ish.

lai-yin• 5 years ago

The soundtrack, amnesia mysteries, with hint of sci-fi make me long for Mr Robot.

techdragon• 5 years ago

I’m really not seeing any connection to office space beyond… toxic workplace culture… and I mean that’s kind of a thing in a lot of movies, so I’m really not sure why they bothered to draw the connection to Office Space at all.

Does look interesting though. The use of a camera focus shifting looks to be stylistically interesting and a good way to follow along with the characters mental mode switching.

I’m kind of hoping this is just a 1 season “long movie” and we get a nicely wrapped up story, because I’m struggling to see this concept really managing more than a season and a half before it feels like they would just dragging it out.

owyn• 5 years ago

It really doesn't sound like Office Space at all. Maybe more like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind crossed with Vanilla Sky and the classic sci-fi novel Dayworld (That future world of 7 people each living one day with the rest in suspended animation, but the main character lives all 7 days...)

birdyrooster• 5 years ago

I am guessing the author was lead to this thought because near the end of the trailer is this Office Space esque quote: "what is it we actually do here?" (similar to "What would you say ya do here?" by Bob Slydell)

Also, in Office Space, Initech is bureaucratic and top heavy with management and push over employees that seem to accept the mistreatment until the last straw: management hires consultants to downsize the company. That decision starts a chain of events that eventually causes Milton to burn down the company and retire to the tropics with the stolen money. In Severance, I am guessing there will be a similar existential crisis for the business which arises from management smashing one moral barrier too many in the course of trying to achieve greater profitability.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

I am guessing the author was lead to this thought

The author of the article (assuming, as is usually the case, they aren't also the author of the headline) doesn't mention Office Space at all.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

so I’m really not sure why they bothered to draw the connection to Office Space at all

Because the body of the article mentions The Office and the headline writer doesn't know the difference? (Office Space isn't mentioned in the body at all.)

bvm• 5 years ago

clicks. lots of people know Office Space, no one knows Severance. so you draw a connection between something people are familiar with.

Tabular-Iceberg2• 5 years ago

lots of people know Office Space

Do they really? I expect most people on HN to know it, but I’m not so sure about the general population. It’s one of my favourite movies and I often found myself referencing it in office settings, but had to stop because nobody got them, not even once. Most people hadn’t heard of it, and the few who had seen it didn’t like it.

I think Mike Judge is an absolute genius, but none of his movies have performed well commercially. Maybe they lack mass appeal, most people simply never experience toxic work environments, or they do, but fail to recognise it as such. Or the movies were just under-marketed. Whatever the cause, these things aren’t exactly household names.

Tabular-Iceberg2• 5 years ago

Peter asks the hypnotist if he can make it so that he doesn’t know that he’s at work. The new series explores that scenario.

redundantly2• 5 years ago

Don't see how this fits being posted to HN. Maybe I'm a fuddy duddy, though.

jjulius2• 5 years ago

HN is full of "nerds" and nerds (edit: stereotypically) love Sci-Fi. It's also full of conversations about work/office-related topics. So, Sci-Fi + Office Space being topical here makes sense in a very generalized way. At least IMO.

redundantly2• 5 years ago

The comparison to Office Space is specious at best.

GuestHNUser• 5 years ago

I got the same impression. I find it strangely reminiscent of a sponsored reddit advertisement.

CRConrad4• 5 years ago

Sorry about that. It was, as jjulius said, the combination of SF and "office" theme that I thought would fit.

KennyBlanken• 5 years ago

Direct link to video instead of the blogspam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEQP4VVuyrY

notfed• 5 years ago

(OP make this the direct link please?)

7thaccount• 5 years ago

Wait..."office space" or "the office"? I thought the blog said "the office"?

AnonHP2• 5 years ago

Yeah, the title seems incorrect, with the article making no reference to Office Space but just to The Office.

geocrasher• 5 years ago

More like "an office" these days :D

rexreed• 5 years ago

How is this anything like Office Space, other than taking place in an Office and occupying space? This seems like an extended Black Mirror to me.

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

Gonna guess that this is like Sorry to Bother You crossed with the show Counterpart.

Animats• 5 years ago

That's so like Apple. Finally, a way to enforce an NDA.

akamaka• 5 years ago

That is unmistakably the former Bell Labs research building! What a fantastic choice of location to film in. I’ll have to watch this for that alone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex

rrdharan• 5 years ago

I had the privilege of working there for a summer (as an intern at Lucent in 1999).

That was my first office job and between that and occasional childhood visits to my father’s workplace - a giant Bank of Montreal compound in suburban Toronto (https://goo.gl/maps/XFmPDMM5qFgQc4ie9) I just assumed that all offices were grandiose concrete and glass structures with massive sweeping vistas.

How disappointed I was by most of my subsequent corporate office experiences…

Meanwhile the Holmdel complex reopened to the public as Bell Works and is worth a visit if you’re in the area!

user3939382• 5 years ago

That was the first thing I noticed, too. Super cool. I’ve never been there in person, but the people and projects that arose from that building make it a semi-mystical place for me.

agapon• 5 years ago

I visited it once while working at Bellcore / Telcordia's Piscataway office.

bdowling2• 5 years ago

This was probably inspired more by Philip K. Dick's Paycheck than Office Space. In Paycheck, the protagonist agrees to work on a secret project for two years, after which his memory will be erased.

pstuart2• 5 years ago

PKD is a gold mine of stories for the screen.

godelski• 5 years ago

For anyone that missed it Amazon's Electric Dreams are just PKD short stories. I was rather surprised that they got some big name actors in it.

paxys• 5 years ago

PKD is a gold mine for heavily modified stories for the screen. His imagination, themes, sci-fi concepts and world building are all fantastic, but he falls way short on characters, dialogue and plot.

Benjammer• 5 years ago

There's a 2003 movie version of Paycheck with Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Paul Giamatti, and like 4 other people you'll probably recognize. I watched it when it popped up on Amazon Prime last year. Seems like it's not reviewed very highly but I enjoyed it going in with no expectations and not really knowing what it was about.

alostpuppy• 5 years ago

I liked it.

DevKoala• 5 years ago

I remember watching it and I thought it fell apart in the second half. I really cannot remember how it ends, just that I didn’t like it. The concept of erasing your memory after you complete a job stuck with me, and was probably the most remarkable part of the movie.

drdeadringer• 5 years ago

I watched this "live in theatre" when it came out and enjoyed it.

It may be a buggered memory, but I don't recall seeing a movie about reverse engineering often.

thelittlenag• 5 years ago

I find that I'm digging the late 70's / early 80's aesthetic for the show. It lends a good bit of "other-worldliness" to the trailer.

bni• 5 years ago

It reminds me of the aesthetic of the game Control, by Finnish studio Remedy. The producers of this show probably played it.

mikewarot• 5 years ago

So Apple is funding a metacriticism of itself?

It's like someone said... what's the worst thing about working at a FAANG?, and dialed it up to 11.

kelseyfrog• 5 years ago

A society seeped in commodified self-critique renders impotent any critique of real substance.

That's what's so intriguing about the current political economy. It has effectively packaged up critiques of itself and folded them into the spectacle. Through this lens Severance may be a harbinger of future work critique films. Given the state of labor relations it's easy to imagine an appetite for films that give viewers the cathartic release of work tension they hunger for. In the context of the first statement, it's also easy to see the dangers in this pattern of behavior.

paganel• 5 years ago

Very well put, actively integrating the self-critique part is one of the most important things that allowed the current capitalist system to hold its top place (and even to thrive, at some points). The socialist system also tried to integrate the self-critique part ("auto-critică" it was called in Romanian) but failed to do that, hence why the external actors managed to take hold of the "critique of the socialism" discourse.

Back to the self critique of capitalism, I see punk as a prime example of that, it's what I think allowed capitalism to navigate through the turbulent (from a socio-economic point of view) late '70s - early '80s as well as it did. Grunge, on a smaller scale, did the same thing for the Western capitalism of the early '90s, shows like "Black Mirror" did that for the creeping surveillance capitalism of the mid 2010s (we now say "it's just like in a Black Mirror episode", without taking any concrete steps to mitigate the surveillance capitalism creeping in on us).

remarkEon• 5 years ago

what's the worst thing about working at a FAANG?

Not me, but another friend of mine who's also a veteran told me the worst thing about working at a FAANG is that everyone there seems to assume that company's work as their entire personal identity. For reasons that should be obvious ... for a veteran that's kinda hard to do.

j5r5myk• 5 years ago

Like a lot of these shows this scooped up a large crop of the New York film production workers for many months. I know a bunch of people that worked on it, including my roommate. Funny seeing it on the front page of HN.

dpratt• 5 years ago

I’m likely in the minority here, but I am grumpy enough to completely ignore what look like otherwise entertaining shows when they’re released with the artificial scarcity model. Waiting a week for each episode was required by technological necessity in the days of broadcast TV, but on a streaming platform it just feels like the provider is giving me the finger. “I could give you all the episodes now, because they’re all completed and waiting for me to press this button, here, but I won’t. Why? Well, a part of it is because I’m afraid that you’ll cancel if you exhaust all our content, and I want to use psychological tricks to make you stick around due to an fear of missing out, but really, if I’m honest, it’s just because I like messing with people and I enjoy their displeasure, doubly so when I cause it.”

CharlesW• 5 years ago

Waiting a week for each episode was required by technological necessity in the days of broadcast TV, but on a streaming platform it just feels like the provider is giving me the finger.

Some viewers (and I suspect most creators) prefer a serialized release over season dumps, and there are definite pros to it from a social/conversational perspective.

Even Netflix is doing this to help create more interest for titles. For example, the 9 episodes of Arcane were released in three, 3-episode "acts".

On the bright side, you can still binge at season's end if you prefer that experience. You can even wait until the show has ended, since the time between season releases must seem especially cruel to you.

avl999• 5 years ago

Airing 1 or 2 episodes a week gives maximum opportunity for a show to be successful, esp if it's a smaller show that doesn't have a built in audience (ie. if it's not a Marvel/Disney show or returning seasons of successful shows). Airing weekly means that there is an ongoing conversation around your show (if it's any good) and each media outlet is potentially writing about your show n times as opposed to writing about your show 1 time reviewing the entire thing, that results in more chances for the audience finding your show. The cancelling the service thing is at best a secondary concern. Moreover creators of many show prefer that their show be consumed on a week to week basis as opposed to binged in 1 sitting with little opportunity for the audience to reflect on it.

HBO has mastered that art of "1 episode a week to maximize the audience and buzz of what appears to be a niche show" even on their streaming service and as a result have found unconventional hits like Euphoria, The White Lotus, Succession, The Leftovers which would otherwise have been lost in the glut of peak tv abyss if they were just dropped in one night.

em-bee• 5 years ago

i watch only one episode per day, but i like to watch several shows in parallel. even if they come out all at once, i get to see an episode of each show only about once a week.

i discuss most of the shows i watch with my friends. when they come out weekly, then we have a discussion about the new episode every week. if they come out at once, then not much discussion happens.

so yes, weekly releases are definitely more engaging.

bawana• 5 years ago

More dystopian stories to distract us from the real dystopia swallowing us - dwindling health care , 16 hr waits in the emergency room, rising copays while administrators whose work consists of emails and making short sighted decisions continue to take home fat paychecks

jerry1979• 5 years ago

Not surprising that capitalism commodifies capitalism anxiety.

spacehome• 5 years ago

Our healthcare system has very little to do with capitalism or free markets.

javajosh• 5 years ago

Don't forget about the false sense of security science fiction gives us about our civilizations ability to survive calamity, or spread beyond earth. And also the false sense of power super-spy fiction gives us over government security forces (and likewise a false sense of how gov sec forces function). I think both have a real distorting effect on our intuitions about the world.

esturk• 5 years ago

Maybe the distraction is voluntary because for higher cognitive individuals, like many here, they realize there's nothing they can do about it.

Wiseacre2• 5 years ago

How is that? Strikes and collective action actually do work.

readingnonsense• 5 years ago

bread and circuses

CRConrad4• 5 years ago

More dystopian stories to distract us from the real dystopia swallowing us

Distract from -- or remind of / allude to?

kochie• 5 years ago

So... it's a glimpse into working for Facebook/Meta in 2030?

happybuy3• 5 years ago

Following Severance (which will be out in February) Apple TV+ will also release an eight episode series called "WeCrashed" based upon the WeWork saga in March [1].

And if you haven't seen it, there is also Mythic Quest (seasons 1 and 2) that is an Apple TV+ comedy series based in the offices of a game studio.

Also don't forget The Morning Show which is an Apple TV+ drama based in the offices of a fictional breakfast TV show.

So no matter what type of dysfunctional workplace you may enjoy, Apple will have you covered.

[1] https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2022/01/academy-award-winne...

yellow_lead• 5 years ago

How about one where the office is located on a Superfund / toxic waste site [1]?

[1] https://truthout.org/articles/apple-employee-blows-whistle-o...

pasquinelli• 5 years ago

there are also people who don't work in an office.

happybuy3• 5 years ago

Don't worry there's plenty of streaming originals on Apple TV+ catering for people who don't work in an office too.

Such as Mr. Corman about a school teacher who used to work in a classroom but due to COVID is working from home.

Or Acapulco a comedy series about a twenty-something cabana boy who works at the hottest resort in Acapulco during the heady days of the 80s.

And for people who prefer a side-hustle, there's Physical which tells the story of a housewife that starts running aerobics classes in her spare time while successfully launching an accompanying home video lifestyle startup.

krrrh• 5 years ago

Don’t forget For All Mankind, an engineering workplace drama based in Houston, and Ted Lasso, which centres around hijinks in the back office of an English football club.

bredren2• 5 years ago

The Apple original, Swagger, is also very good. Does a best job of depicting the onset of the pandemic that I’ve seen on screen.

It also has the best motion graphics integrations of social media I’ve seen. It breaks new ground in the way House of Cards did with texting.

The Apple Original sci-fi series, Invasion, is terrible. I can’t believe they renewed it for a second season.

Wiseacre2• 5 years ago

What is the difference between Apple TV and Apple TV+? Do you work for Apple?

joshschreuder• 5 years ago

Apple TV is a hardware device that connects to your TV, Apple TV+ is a streaming video service

bredren2• 5 years ago

The naming scheme is unfortunate.

happybuy3• 5 years ago

Those marvellous marketers at Apple sometimes hit it out of the park and sometimes trip over themselves when it comes to naming. For their media services it's unfortunately the latter.

Here's the straightforward guide to everything named Apple TV:

Apple TV – the separate hardware box that runs tvOS, connects to your TV and enables you to view streaming apps developed specifically for this platform on your TV

Apple TV app - an application that runs on the Apple TV hardware box, iOS, macOS and third party TV platforms (Google TV, WebOS, Tizen)

Apple TV+ - the Apple streaming service that provides access to Apple Original TV and Movies that is accessible through the Apple TV app on all supported platforms

Apple TV Channels – third party streaming services (such as Paramount+) that can be subscribed via the Apple TV app whereby the subscription management and streaming data is handled by Apple and not the third party steaming service

So simple!

King-Aaron2• 5 years ago

Also Foundation, where people are told not to work on Earth anymore and are promptly exiled to the edge of the galaxy. Quite a good take on the Isaac Asimov story to be honest.

laumars• 5 years ago

Cinematically it’s gorgeous and I can’t really fault the casting either. But the romance elements they’ve a added are distracting and unnecessary.

gsich• 5 years ago

The genetic dynasty was the best part. Foundation stuff was mostly boring.

LunaSea• 5 years ago

It's a highly politicised and terrible adaptation of the Asimov trilogy.

Cinematically gorgeous but that's about it.

hazza_n_dazza• 5 years ago

I heard it was aweful if you've read the books. Couldn't be more different.

izacus• 5 years ago

There's also Ted Lassso which is one of the most feel-good series I've seen this year. And it fits the "workplace comedy" description as well (and no, despite it looking like it's about soccer... it's not about soccer).

totetsu• 5 years ago

Not on Apple but Planetes is a decent space station office drama.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Planetes_episodes

Lio• 5 years ago

They should make one about what it's like to work, eat and sleep in a giant dystopian electronics factory located in a futuristic totalitarian state...

...but they probably won't. :P

prepend2• 5 years ago

Adam Scott is looking very much like Tig Notaro.

cm2187• 5 years ago

Office Space is interesting, it’s one of these movies to which I see references all the times while I have never run into someone in real life who actually saw it or even heard of it. The other one being This is Spinal Tap.

prepend2• 5 years ago

I think that your experience is just a personal limitation or perhaps just bad luck.

It’s a good movie, you should watch it.

I suppose cultural touchstones have varying levels of awareness. Everyone I know has seen it but there are obviously some who have not.

cowvin• 5 years ago

Well, they're both old. Many people around my age have seen them both. Maybe they're just before your time.

ryan-allen• 5 years ago

Zombie movies never scared me, but this does!

lucraft• 5 years ago

I hope they explore the upsides of separating your memories like this.

Because the downsides seem pretty obvious to me...

Ben Stiller’s New Series Is a Sci-Fi Take on Office Space

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