Editors’ Picks: Let’s Talk About Those Watches In ‘Severance’
If we had a dime for every time a friend texted us about a new TV show and said “you HAVE to watch it,” we could damn near buy an Aquanaut. So we’re not trying to be those guys right now. But we’re telling you, we can’t stop watching the new Apple TV+ show Severance, which has a surprisingly strong watch component for a dystopian office drama.
Directed by Ben Stiller, the show follows a group of corporate employees at a company called Lumon who’ve undergone an operation called “severance.” The invasive procedure involves having a microchip implanted into your brain to bifurcate your memories. When at work, you have no memory of your personal life, and when you leave the office you have no memory of your work life. It’s as if Michel Gondry directed an adaptation of a Phillip K. Dick novel.
Adam Scott as Mark in Severance. Image courtesy, Apple
Watches are very much linked to the plot. The timepieces in this show symbolize the lives of the characters both in and outside of work – one watch for each. The show colloquially refers to these two lives as “innie” and “outtie,” and so we’ll continue with that nomenclature here.
The main character, Mark (played by Adam Scott, the actor not the golfer) wears a Vostok as his outtie, and an absolutely logo-less watch with a white dial and leather strap as his innie.
Similar Vostok Komandirskie to the watch worn by Mark in Severance. Image, Amazon
As it turns out, the Vostok Komandirskie Automatic 2416/921307 was from the personal kit of prop master Catherine Miller (who also did the watches in Uncut Gems). Russian watches are common in prop kits because they’re so cheap and their design is so varied, so that made sense for the outtie. For the innie, she needed something with no dial text, not even numbers – because the innie workers are not permitted to pass messages to the outside world or their outtie selves; a text detector is set up in the elevator which triggers an alarm that spells doom for whoever is caught breaking protocol. “In our mind,” Miller says, the characters “go to a store that’s like a uniform store and there’s three …read more
