Apple TV’s Severance is a lot like Lost, the hit ABC show. While that might make some Redditors worry, it’s a good thing — after all, there’s been a lot to learn
As the second season of Severance aired, relief filled the air — the beloved sci-fi workplace satire was finally, finally back. But as the weeks ticked by, the sentiments of some longtime watchers began to sour. Disappointment and wariness dispersed across social media, as many viewers felt that the show wasn’t measuring up with the long-cultivated hype.
This is one of the inevitabilities of our current state of streaming. Short seasons take years to be filmed and aired, leaving huge hiatuses in between. These hiatuses are vacuums, which fandoms naturally abhor. They fill up quickly with speculation and expectation, building up the long-awaited return to a level so lofty that pretty much no new season, no matter how good, can fulfill it.
Severance’s hiatus was extended unduly by the 2023 actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood that landed squarely during its production schedule, so the hype had even more time to build than usual. When Severance finally returned, it was far more popular than it had been the first go round: officially the most-watched show on Apple TV Plus, a rare bit of data revealed by the streamer alongside its announcement of an obligatory third-season renewal. That puts it above even Apple’s previous juggernaut, Ted Lasso, and raises expectations for its quality even higher.
That’s a lot of pressure for any show, especially one walking in the footsteps of giants — inevitably, Severance has drawn comparisons to hit “mystery box” shows of the past, and in particular Lost. That show also generated big fan theorizing, huge ratings, and an unmeetable amount of fan expectations. But 20 years on, a lot has changed in the entertainment industry and in the world of TV fandom. There’s no way Severance is going to walk the exact same path Lost did — in fact, both its similarities and its differences show how far we’ve come.
Despite protestations about being “exhausted” by the endless mystery of shows like Severance, based on ratings alone, people are clearly not tired of the “mystery box” series format that Lost was a vital innovator of. When the basic setup — people trapped together in a strange place run by a mysterious entity, uncovering secrets that might lead to their escape — is done well, it can be fantastic: a watercooler phenom, the talk of the town. Lost not only became the most prominent example of the TV format, but also the internet format for discussion, which, in the social media age, has taken on a much more intense and heightened aspect. Lost’s crown was the subject of grabs from many potential heirs, from shows like Fringe and FlashForward, whose airdates overlapped with the OG, to modern mystery-box updates like Dark, From, and Yellowjackets that adapted different elements while aiming to stoke the same fan frenzy which characterized Lost’s digital heights.
Of all these shows, Severance is perhaps the most worthy candidate for a successor to Lost’s throne so far because it manages to hit all of the same buttons even harder, and with more focus and intention.
