All TV programmes—all fiction of any kind, I guess—have to reckon with the problem of when to give the viewer the answers. Questions hook, answers satisfy. Once satisfied by an answer, how to keep the audience hooked? With more questions. Getting this balance right is at the heart of what makes a mystery-based show, in particular, a good watch—or a total wash.
Let’s take a classic example of a show that did this wrong: Lost. The first season of Lost, the hit show following a group of stranded plane crash victims, is stunning. The mystery of what is happening on their island deepens so compellingly. And then there were more mysteries. And more mysteries still. Eventually there were so many mysteries—what was the polar bear about? How did one character’s father end up on this island all of a sudden?—that it became impossible to believe that there were going to be satisfying answers to all of them. And, indeed, there were not.
Or how about a very different kind of show that created a similar problem for itself? Line of Duty. The ending to that—the long-awaited reveal of the identity of H, a corrupt police officer—was so laughably implausible, made such a mockery of all the clue-gathering work that viewers had been so diligently doing for six seasons, that it made the entire series feel cheap in retrospect.
Paradise, released in February, is the latest TV series from the showrunner of the dramedy This is Us, Dan Fogelman. Like that earlier show, it stars Sterling K Brown, but where This is Us was a sort of science fiction about the power of love and making long speeches about your feelings to overcome any obstacle, Paradise is sci-fi in its truest sense. Brown plays a bodyguard to the US president, and, in the first episode, the president is found dead. Good, classic mystery. Who killed him? We don’t know. Could be Brown himself, could be another of his staff, could be anybody. But, in the dying moments of this first episode, the series drops another enormous mystery on viewers: it turns out that this picture-postcard American town we’ve been watching is in fact an artificial town, complete with a fake sky, in an enormous underground bunker. Mystery abounds! Click episode two!
And I did and was excited to. But, from there, the series can’t sustain the weight of its own premise. Mystery one, of who killed the president, isn’t handed to you too early; rather, the early resolution of mystery two, why this underground bunker town exists, is so silly-feeling that the answer to mystery one starts to feel unimportant.
Then there is Severance, which premiered in 2022, and whose much-anticipated second season was released over recent weeks. To my mind, unlike Paradise, this is a masterwork of mystery-box writing. Severance follows a group of employees at a deeply sinister corporation called Lumon, who have undergone a consensual procedure to “sever” their minds in two: their working selves (innies) and their outside-of-work selves (outies). When they’re at work, they have no knowledge of their life outside the 9-to-5; when they leave work, they have no memories of their corporate lives. What this means, in essence, is that the innies are perpetually at work, living an endless Groundhog Day of tasks for which they don’t understand the meaning and wondering what their lives might be like on the outside.
What Severance could have done is leant hard into the weirdness-for-weirdness’s-sake. But the risk there is that, instead of an impressionist, absurd masterpiece like, say, Twin Peaks, you end up with Lost. That’s not what Severance has done so far. Yes, it’s weird, and in ways the show doesn’t (yet) explain. But the weirdness is leavened by the swiftness at which it gives viewers (some) answers.
We don’t, for instance, spend all of season two wondering whether Helly R (Britt Lower), the innie, is in fact Helena Eagan, the outie, in disguise. The show tells us, in the course of one episode, that she is. Things actually happen, episode to episode. The innies plan how they are going to let their outies know about the misery of their lives—and enact those plans. Mark S (Adam Scott) decides to get himself un-severed by a back-alley method, and then we see how that pans out. The right balance has been struck between the questions and the answers.
But, having said all this, the second season of Severance is not the end of the Severance story. The central mystery, of what the Lumon corporation is actually doing, remains decidedly unclear. There is going to be a third season, so there’s still plenty of time for the show to throw it all away, Lost-style. I feel cautiously confident that they won’t, but—as with all mysteries—let us see.
