Last week, a video on my feed shocked me. It had the aesthetics from ‘Severance‘ and featured Adam Scott from ‘Severance.’ Then, in the middle, Jake from State Farm showed up. Yes, this was an ad, for State Farm, taking place in the offices of Lumon Corporation, from the TV show Severance. Our main character is new, a young woman who wants to be “severed” from her parents’s car insurance. She volunteers to descend to the Lumon Basement to make this a reality. At first, this confuses her. But Jake appears to tell her it’s all fine, like our heroine is Patrick Mahomes or something.
I felt like I’d been the one who’d undergone the severance procedure. Season 2 of Severance, which critics and viewers have lauded with more praise than any TV show I can remember, is currently airing. As of this sentence, they’d shown seven episodes. And yet here we have an ad for a company that has nothing to do with the content of Severance, gumming up our feeds, acting like bonus content. Severance isn’t some sort of random, mainstream slop, either. It’s as incisive a critique of corporate capitalism and the culture of work that TV has ever produced. To promote an insurance company using not just its aesthetics, but its actual set and its star, is a surreal insult to anyone who ever took the show even semi-seriously.
There’s absolutely no precedent for the Severance/State Farm team-up in pop-culture history. Could you imagine Agent Dale Cooper in an ad for Maxwell House Coffee–while Twin Peaks was still on the air? Or the cast from Lost appearing in an ad for an actual airline? Or the employees of Dunder Mifflin advertising an actual paper company? It’s as if we were in 1993, and during the Super Bowl Mulder and Scully were trying to solve a mystery with the help of Grimace.
On the other hand, though people love Severance, and it obviously scratches a deep pop-culture itch, Apple still owns the brand. Severance is a hit TV show, and also a consumable product from the largest company in the world. The previous big Apple hit, Ted Lasso, started life as a commercial for NBC Sports, and ended up as a treacly dram-com about the magic of Christmas. So it’s not a huge surprise that Severance began as the most brutal indictment of work ever put on screen and ended up as a de facto celebrant of the insurance industry.
Even darker and more surreal is Severance’s partnership with Zip Recruiter. At least State Farm is a company that offers a product. If they want to assume the Severance aesthetic of The Office combined with Logan’s Run, and are willing to pay Apple for the privilege, that’s their prerogative. But Zip Recruiter is a company that matches desperate people with crappy, impersonal jobs. There’s not even a wink in their ads. “Lumon Enterprises,” a fake company that essentially feels like Scientology combined with the Illuminati and Palantir, has “partnered” with Zip Recruiter in its ads, using actual clips from the actual show. It’s horrifying.
We, the consumers of culture, stand helpless in the wake of this phenomenon. The cool-to-lame pipeline has shortened to non-existence, to a drip. Severance was cool, briefly, and now it’s lame forever. There’s no longer even a pretense of resisting corporate influence in entertainment. We’ll endure the dreary lattice of the simulacrum, and we’ll like it. Nothing means anything, no one is authentic, and everything is pre-sold and prepackaged before we even have a chance to make an independent judgment. Like it or not, this is reality now.
Or is it?
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