This video essay constitutes a case study for a broader ongoing project I’m currently engaged with, arguing for the central role of identity fragmentation in contemporary American television. This broader project focuses on “Prestige TV” (a term widely used in the public discourse) which can be seen as a discursive evolution of the term “Quality TV” (Thompson, 1997) which gained significant notice as a cultural phenomenon since the late 90s. According to Keeler and Friedman, Thompson’s “Quality TV” connotes an older era in TV’s history as well as implies a judgment of value that in time came to include almost exclusively male centred American premium cable shows. “Prestige TV” on the other hand is more modern and inclusive (in terms of the broadcasting network/streaming service, the shows’ audiences and the protagonists’ gender), though still connotes a certain exclusivity (Keeler and Friedman, 2022). Those differences aside, both “Quality TV” and the later “Prestige TV” can be seen as genres with a defined set of characteristics that set them apart from “regular” more common generic TV affairs.

To give some broader context, in this research I argue that numerous American TV shows from the past 25 years, shows such as The Sopranos, Mad Men, Ted Lasso, The Americans, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Rehearsal, and Succession to name a few, create and highlight fragmented identities for their (largely-male) protagonists is such a way that one identity corresponds to the protagonist’s professional life and another to his private life. Ideally, these identities inhabit their own respective environments: the workplace on the one hand, and the domestic sphere on the other, with minimal to zero transgression. Using this framework, I set out to examine how different shows engage with these often-conflicting identities they create and encourage. To be more precise, I am looking into the different ways these shows depict the characters’ failure to find any kind of balance between the fragments of their identity, often turning this failure into a major theme throughout the show. Ultimately, I aim to establish that these representations of fragmented identities are not just psychological or narrative devices, but function as a core thematic concern for American Prestige TV, and are accompanied by corresponding aesthetic devices that reflect broader social and economic forces associated with neoliberal capitalism and its evolving place within the American ethos.

While engaging with this subject matter, it seems impossible to ignore Apple TV’s Severance (2022-present), in which the conflict between the professional and the personal is probably as blatant and explicit as it ever was on American TV. Though its premise is science fictional, its main thematic concerns are very much in the realm of more grounded prestige dramas such as The Sopranos or Mad Men. In Severance, new recruits to Lumon Industries (a mysterious company we know almost nothing about) are required to undergo an innovative, invasive, and controversial new procedure that severs their brain and creates two distinct personalities, each with its own consciousness and its own set of memories. A chip in the brain is then able to automatically “switch” between these two personalities depending on the worker’s whereabouts: one personality will be reserved solely for the workplace, and another will be switched on whenever the workers make their way out of the Lumon building. Each of these two personalities ideally remains oblivious to whatever the other one is up to.

Severance was supposed to be one of my simplest case studies, an overly overt representation of the conflict between the personal and the professional, commenting on the career-oriented, capitalistic, competitive, and pressure-inducing American society in a clear, lucid, and unequivocal manner. This quickly proved to be a conceited underestimation of the show. At a very preliminary stage of researching my project, while attending the “Reframing the Argument” workshop, I engaged with Ariel Avisar’s timeline dissection prompt, setting out to examine how Severance splits its runtime between its two ostensibly conflicting spaces – Lumon industries vs. the protagonists’ domestic environments – first in the pilot episode, and then in subsequent episodes. Avissar encourages us to “Devise a method of videographic analysis that makes use of the various capabilities of your editing software, with an emphasis on the timeline panel, and apply the method to your chosen media object” (Avissar, 2024. Italics in source). This inspired the idea to use the editing software’s timeline to examine how the temporal relations between Severance’s conflicting spaces change over the course of its two seasons, which might lead to some initial insights.

The method I devised was simple enough: layering each Severance episode on a different video track in the editing software and then using colour coding to differentiate between scenes that take place in a professional environment and those that take place in domestic spaces. This would result in 19 colour-coded video tracks (corresponding to the show’s 19 episodes), all visible at once on my editing panel. If there were any major differences in colour distribution, this would become quickly visibly apparent.

Theory is one thing, however, and practice is another. Almost as soon as I laid the pilot episode on the timeline and made the first cut, I realised I was grossly underestimating the complexities of the spatial elements I initially set out to investigate. This realisation is embodied in the video essay presented here, which is very different from the original video I intended to make. The version I ultimately present argues for the intricacies that might have eluded my research without the application of this specific timeline dissection method. While trying to create a clear dichotomy between professional and domestic spaces, this method revealed numerous undefined, ambiguous, and liminal spaces that are omnipresent throughout the show, undermining a simplistic reading of its core conflicts and themes. As this video essay attempts to argue, Severance’s apparent spatial dichotomy is fused time and time again with a variety of spaces that gradually become harder to associate with either a professional or a domestic space. Throughout the show, the elevator of the Lumon building might be the most frequent and thus iconic of those spaces; it’s a space our protagonists inhabit at least twice a day, once in the morning, on their way down to the office, and a second time when office hours are over, and in which their brain chip “switches” between their work and domestic identities. On the one hand it’s a professional space, an apparent part of the office building. On the other hand, it’s one of the only spaces that both identities are familiar with and aware of. As the show progresses, the elevator is often a space of conflict. As the split identities in our protagonist’s mind become aware of each other, and even try to communicate with each other, the elevator is presented not as a space of transformation but as an unpredictable liminal space, confusing, precarious and at times violent, as characters battle with themselves and with each other.

This video explores how we might make use of unconventional research methods to renegotiate ostensibly open and shut texts such as Severance, and revel in the new research opportunities that might ensue. This case study, however, is both a revelation and a cause for reflection. As mentioned earlier, Severance offers probably the most explicit representation of the work/life balance conflict on American television. Recognising such complexities in the show’s structure, as this video attempts to argue, might warrant a serious examination or re-examination of similar themes in ostensibly more complex texts such as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, to name a few, and of their relation to the old and familiar conflict between the personal and the professional, rooted deep in the American ethos.