Toby Manhire tells you everything you need to know ahead of season two of Severance.

After an agonising wait – nearly three years between waffles, thanks to US actor and writer strikes and, some say, creative squabbles – Severance returns today, Friday January 17. For my money the first season was just about the most compelling television of the century to date. Part workplace satire, part dystopian thriller; enchanting, funny, contemplative, absurdist, beautifully acted, exquisitely scripted, mesmerising to look at – I almost feel sorry for the second season having to follow that. 

Severance takes place in the wintry fictional city of Kier, a company town named after the cultishly revered founder of Lumon Industries, Kier Eagan. Half of the action plays out on the Severed Floor of the vast Lumon HQ. Here, the workers do not know themselves outside of work, just as their outside-work selves (or “outies”) know nothing of their “innies”. The outie existence begins, naturally, writhing around on a board table. 

If that sounds like something out of Black Mirror, yes, it is a bit, but it more than survives elaboration into a full-length series. The show is full of mysteries and hypotheses, but never feels stunty. The seed of the idea was planted in the brain of creator Dan Erickson when he was working temp jobs so tedious that he found himself fantasising about the idea of being able to leap immediately from clocking in to clocking out without enduring the tedium in between. Fittingly, somehow, given the corridor warren of Severance, he was working in a factory that made and repaired doors. 

Most of the season one action centres in the Macrodata Refinement department. “These people,” executive producer and director Ben Stiller told the New York Times recently, “are in a workplace doing a job that they don’t understand; they don’t know who they are or why they’re there.” One of them, Helly R (Britt Lower) is newly arrived. Mark (Adam Scott) has been promoted to team leader, following the disappearance – sorry, resignation – of Petey. Outside work, a desperate Petey is trying to warn Mark’s outie about something very serious. 

It’s hard to recount the plot without sounding silly, so I’ll stop at that and say simply this is a majestic meditation on memory, grief, loneliness, friendship, personality, the role of work and HR piffle. Insofar as it’s sci-fi, this is the offspring of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind rather than Star Trek. In atmosphere and mischief there is a discernible debt to the late, great David Lynch. If you haven’t watched it, do give it a chance. If you have watched already, it warrants a second viewing – in my household we planned to space out rewatches in the lead-up the new season but ended up devouring it in three nights. True completists might like to revisit the first season complete with the freshly released podcast postmortems from Stiller and Scott.

Among the pressing questions that may get answered, in part at least, in the episodes to come (some S1 spoilers, I suppose, follow):

• What response will Helly’s (innie) bombshell speech at the Lumon expo have, and what will her outie have to say about it?
• Just how much trouble and time in the Break Room will Dylan (Zach Cherry) for going full insurrectionist and engaging the Overtime Contingency Protocol? 
• What is really going on on the Severed Floor – and what is microdata refinement (try it here)? Are the workers undertaking neural experiments in an R&D facility for the world’s most elaborate anaesthesia, to inoculate the psyche from, say, childbirth or war, or to somehow irrigate memories? Or, even, crash test dummies for efforts to bring people back from the dead?
• Speaking of: did Mark’s wife, “Ms Casey” (Dichen Lachman), in fact die, what is she doing on the severed floor as a wellbeing coach, and can Mark’s innie and outie conspire to liberate her?
• What on earth is going on with Mrs Selvig aka Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette)? Is she in a permanently severed state, what grip does Lumon have over her, and who, exactly, is the “Charlotte Cobel” on the hospital bracelet (birth date 3-17-44) in the Kier shrine at her home? Is it her mother? A sister? Or her?
• Why does the outie of Irv (John Turturro) spend all his time painting canvases black, is his outie an insomniac or deliberately trying to make his innie sleepy and isn’t he sick of listening to Motörhead and does he have any future with Burt?
• Will Ricken receive the accolades he deserves for the seminal text The You You Are, A Spiritual Biography (sample line: “Bullies are nothing but ‘bull’ and ‘lies’; at the centre of industry is ‘dust’”)?
• What is/are The Board? What happened to Reghabi and how much does she know? Why the waffle parties? And what in the name of Eagan is up with the infant goats?

To the unconverted, the above must read like the garble of a brainwashed dynastic cult devotee superbore, and, look, fair cop, I’m a fan. 

I’m sure many of my fellow frothing Severance devotees will be approaching the second season with some trepidation. Television graveyards, after all, are littered with enigmatic, concept-heavy shows that in return seasons quickly got lost – or Lost, if you prefer – in their own vacuous onanism. But both Stiller and Erickson insist they have the bigger arc mapped out and know how it ends. (Erickson has said that arc could span as much as six seasons). And the early assessments from reviewers who have seen screeners are, frankly, glowing. 

And so I, for one, am approaching season two with a clarity of purpose: vision, verve, wit, cheer, humility, benevolence, nimbleness, probity and, naturally, wiles. Praise Kier.

Severance returns today to AppleTV+.