Severance’s ‘Woe’s Hollow’ shows how TV used to take its time

If you just started a TV show made in the last five years, there’s a good chance whatever you saw in episode 1 is going to be critically important to the finale. After all, how could it not be — the season only has six, or maybe eight or 10, episodes in total. The problem is, when every moment of a show is critical to its overall plot, the less we actually get to understand about the characters as people. But the fourth episode of Severance season 2 is a perfect reminder that TV wasn’t always like this. It used to make space for its characters and their lives and bizarre adventures that only existed to expose their personalities just a little bit more. And boy do I miss TV’s old ways.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Severance season 2 episode 4.]

Severance’s latest episode sends the Macrodata Refinement team on a field trip. The four members venture into a frozen wilderness for some camping, hiking, and good old-fashioned team building. The group traipses around the woods, encounters strange doubles of themselves, and gets to know each other a little better, and for the most part that’s the entire episode. It’s fun, refreshing, and exactly what TV has been missing for the last several years.

On its face, the tight narrative cohesion that short-season TV is built off of sounds like a strength. After all, Chekhov would tell us that the best narratives make economical use of their elements, letting nothing go to waste. But Chekhov wrote plays, not television. Throughout its history as a medium, what’s made television so special is the way that a specific, definable story crawls out of a season’s narrative sprawl. And today’s shows are losing touch with that idea because they aren’t giving their characters the time or space it takes to develop.

Character is the single thing that TV can do better than any other medium. Before Game of Thrones blew the doors off of what you could reasonably spend on a show, TV didn’t have the luxury of million-dollar effects, or The Mandalorian’s Volume stage, to send it to the far corners of the galaxy. Shows were limited to a certain number of sets, where nearly every scene had to take place. Even the famously expensive Lost was contained mostly to a few specific places on the island for its first several seasons. The one thing these shows did have was time to let us get to know their characters.

Across the span of 24 episodes (or 10 to 13 for the really prestigious shows), TV writers rooms could show us who their characters were. For upward of 16 hours a year, we could simply hang out with our favorite characters, getting to know them a little better 42 minutes at a time. A whole team of writers gave voice to these fictional people across dozens of small, seemingly unimportant moments that started to build a fully fleshed-out person, and they could build plots that were driven by the personalities and decisions of those carefully crafted characters.

What makes shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Sopranos great is the fact that they’re driven by the decisions, both good and bad, of believably complex characters that we’re familiar with. Outside circumstances may provide the inciting incident, but most of the plot movement comes from the fallout of these people’s choices. If the plot of any given show is the dial on a safe or the lock on a door, the characters of television were traditionally the imprecise tools of a lock-picking set, delicately toying with the narrative pins until they were perfectly and invisibly aligned. The characters of today’s shows, more often than not, feel like keys, perfectly molded to the peculiarities of their show’s plot to slot right in and smoothly unlock. They have no flaws that might cause unneeded friction, no bumps unless they’re absolutely necessary to the story that’s unwinding around them.

Shows driven by their characters haven’t disappeared completely. Andor, in all its 12-episodes-a-season glory, is a terrific example, as is last year’s Shōgun. Severance, to its credit, is better at this than most shows, particularly on Apple TV Plus — Silo is a particularly egregious example of a show where every moment is driven by the necessities of its plot; meanwhile, Slow Horses is a terrific example of a plot-first show that still manages to work in moments of character, despite its very short seasons.

Severance’s characters at least occasionally grope around in the dark for answers and come up short, or go about their day at work without the need for a crucial reveal. But the show has never felt so fully committed to these moments of pure character development as it does in “Woe’s Hollow.” For most of the episode, we just get to understand Dylan, Mark, Irving, and Helly (sort of) through a completely different lens simply because of how they act in a scenario they’ll likely never return to. Severance’s writers rightly understood that its characters are interesting enough that anyone watching the show would love to just watch them wander around in the woods for a while.

“Woe’s Hollow” was the first time it truly felt like we were getting a good old-fashioned TV hang with our friends in MDR. Sure, the episode ended on a pretty critical moment for the plot, but it’s one that felt quietly and carefully driven toward. All the seemingly innocuous little moments we had witnessed from Irving were quietly building to his innie’s snap. What makes it great, though, is that it didn’t feel like the character knew that until it happened. We just saw him make a believable decision, rather than do something that felt forced. And just like that, for 50 or so minutes, we were back in TV’s golden age.