Review: Severance, "The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design" | Season 1, Episode 5
While worldbuilding remains strong, a deflating lull at the season's mid-way point
While there was once a time when you could generally presume that television seasons would be one of two lengths—22 episodes on broadcast, 13 episodes of cable—it has been years since this has been a safe bet. Streaming accelerated an existing trend toward variable season lengths, and now it feels like it’s a stab in the dark to guess how many episodes a show might produce in a given year.
What I realized watching “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design,” the mid-point in Severance’s nine-episode first season, is that my knowledge of how many episodes are in this season is not necessarily “normal.” I know this is the mid-point of the season because I looked up how many episodes there were on Wikipedia, but if someone doesn’t look that up, and didn’t read a Deadline article about the show getting picked up, how would their understanding of the episode change accordingly? I remember seeing a TikTok about HBO Max’s Peacemaker—I watched the first five episodes and fell beh…