The premise and the set are both interesting, but for so long I’m just waiting for something to happen. I want to feel like a mystery is unfolding before me, that the answer to each of my questions raises another even more fervently in need of addressing. But instead I feel like the writers are withholding information, stalling for time. My intrigue wanes into restlessness.

The pace jolts into high gear at the end of season one, when the writers finally show their cards. All this time they have been sitting on highgrade, plotpromising bombshells. And as the season finale approaches, it’s finally time to drop them. Yes, what a thrill. But I don’t feel so much shocked and swayed as I do manipulated. Is this any way to tell a story? Create a sudden climax and end it right there, with not even the beginnings of resolution? Why didn’t the writers introduce the same ideas earlier in the season and develop them throughout? We all know the answer already. In the end, Severance is more asset than art. It is, above all, a strategic allocation for growing Apple’s share of the streaming market. And how do you keep people watching? You end on a cliffhanger.

As a viewer, I feel my interest being managed and manipulated rather than being cultivated. I don’t feel like a thrilling story is being recounted for my entertainment, I feel like I’m being sold a product. Please keep watching, we promise something interesting is coming soon. I’m sure there are people involved in making Severance that want to make genuinely good TV but the overall effort seems to me more like hedging than striving. It’s ironic when you consider that Lumon’s closest analogue in the real world might in fact be Apple. There is the cultlike adulation of a heroic founder, the snaking corporate campus enshrouded in dark glass, the obnoxious secrecy, and so on, but the most meaningful similarity is the basic one. They are gigantic tech corporations held aloft by myths of technotopian supremacy and driven by an everincreasing hunger for growth and expansion. (Also, Lumon sounds like Lemon.)

The basics of telling a good story is like playing chess. You can’t rely on sneak attacks or smuggled secrets. The pieces and the tensions between them are all in plain view, brought into position one step a time. The tensions build until there comes a natural point when the deadlock breaks and the inevitable drama ensues. Consequences ripple and trigger further action. There is no need to contrive plot. It flows out of confrontation between agents in the story. If nothing happens its because the people moving the pieces don’t know what they are doing. Or they’re holding back.

The writers of Severance might well know how to write a good story. But I think the problem is that the real chess is being played by Apple, who is mobilizing their pieces – Severance, Ted Lasso, and so on – to corner a share of the market. Their ultimate goal is not to make compelling television, but to compel us to keep watching.