Shows like Russian Doll and Severance challenge our assumptions about the world. Photo / Netflix
Shows like Russian Doll and Severance challenge our assumptions about the world. Photo / Netflix
From Russian Doll to Severance, a spate of conceptual TV series are rehearsing thought experiments challenging our assumptions about the world.
With the success of Netflix and its imitators, the long-form drama of the fictional screen serial has moved decisively from broadcast television to on-demand streaming. The dizzying range of shows filling the streaming services are now curated by an algorithm that is a mixture of your own personal preferences and those of people whose preferences you share.
The kinds of shows available on streaming services have largely followed genres we can recognise from classic television and cinema: murder mysteries, romantic comedies, legal procedurals, situation comedies, science fiction epics, and so on.
Yet some shows involve a decisive break from our reality, displaying situations we could not conceive of in our world.
We regard a show as realist if it stays within the parameters of daily life, obeying the rules of rationality. (Crime shows, which often deal with quite baroque situations of violence, nevertheless generally remain situated in a shared reality).
These other shows, involving worlds and people being split by a conceptual premise - amnesia, time loop, a divided world - reveal that television is not always, as is sometimes imagined, escapist. At least it is not escapist in the conventional sense of offering anodyne fantasies that keep the complexities of life at arm’s length.
In these shows, televisual drama functions as a form of serious thought, introducing and acting out experiments that directly address fundamental contradictions within - or limits to - the realism of our world.
Split selves
In the show Counterpart (2017–19), for instance, a physicist in 1980s East Berlin conducts an experiment that accidentally duplicates the universe. He wanders through a tunnel formed in his basement laboratory and finds, to his amazement, his own self walking towards him from the other side.
The action of the story takes place several decades after this radical event. The matter has been kept a closely guarded secret to the populations of both worlds - “Earth Alpha” and “Earth Prime” - but a clandestine crossing point has been maintained.
In the show, the two worlds relate to another like superpowers in a cold war, with agents from both sides trying to steal secrets and sabotage the aims of the other. The uncanny moments occur when an agent meets themselves. They look identical but their characters are different, sometimes subtly, but occasionally diametrically opposite.
In Severance (2022-) there is another version of this “split world” premise. In this case, a corporation has developed a cybernetic procedure to deal with the problem of what we call, in contemporary HR parlance, work-life balance. The solution involves having a chip inserted into your brain, which functions as a switch. At home you remain yourself, in touch with all your memories and involved in the shared reality of everyday life.
But, when you travel to work, you enter a specially modified elevator. Arriving at your floor, all memory of your former life is erased. A second you, devoted only to the tasks of your employment, now takes over. At the end of the day, as you descend back down the lift, all memory of work disappears and your former memories - those connected to the world outside work - are restored.
In this way, the show replicates the conditions of Counterpart, but without needing to double the universe. Simply introducing a distinction in which two versions of the self remain mutually unaware of each other is enough.
A split in the self corresponds to a split world. In the case of Severance, the workers are made aware of their situation, but are only able to accept this with a certain infantile resignation. They refer to themselves as “innies” and to their invisible outside persona - the one who has instituted their existence - as “outies”.
This pattern bears a close resemblance to another and more venerable premise: the amnesia plot. This plot, where a character suddenly loses all memory of their former life, was already a feature of Hollywood cinema in the silent era and was the premise for famous films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). In the streaming era, the amnesia plot can be seen in celebrated shows like Homecoming (2018-20) and I May Destroy You (2020).
Memory and repetition
In Homecoming, returning war veterans are offered treatment at the Homecoming Transitional Support Centre, which promises to help them adjust to daily life. However, unbeknown to them, they are being administered an experimental medicine designed to remove their traumatic war memories. The object of this programme, which is being funded by the military, is not to return the men to daily life but to return them to the front as soon as possible.
In I May Destroy You, the amnesia is more specific and closer to common experience. A young woman is slipped a sedative at a bar and is sexually assaulted. But, because she can remember nothing of the evening, the police are unable to take the matter very far. The woman is a writer and is struggling to produce her second novel.
Outwardly, she shrugs off her assault and insists that her main priority is finishing her novel, having all but spent the advance she has been given. Yet it soon becomes clear that so long as she cannot remember the traumatic event, she can neither create nor live her life. In both Homecoming and I May Destroy You, seemingly such different shows, amnesia creates - or makes visible - a split in the central characters that becomes the defining impasse of the plot.
The amnesia plot is also related to another distinctive premise we see in film and television: the time loop. In this plot, made famous by the film Groundhog Day (1993), a character finds themselves endlessly repeating the same day. Even if, in desperation, they take their own lives, they simply reawaken in the very same morning that they always do.
In the time loop plot, amnesia is experienced not by the central character, but by everybody else. In effect, everyone forgets everything that happened the day before... except the protagonist. This plot outlines a relationship that exists between memory and repetition - a relationship in which only memory can arrest repetition.
The time loop premise has been prominent in recent films, such as the romantic comedy Palm Springs (2020) and science fiction thrillers like Source Code (2011), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Doctor Strange (2016). Within streamed serials, the most prominent example is probably Russian Doll (2019-22), in which a woman living in bohemian New York is forced to endlessly repeat a single day. What becomes clear in this show, as indeed was the case in Groundhog Day, is that the repetition is trying to teach the hero something.
In both Russian Doll and Groundhog Day, the heroes are approaching middle age, but are strangely infantile in their self-absorption and failure to understand their implications in the world. They treat life and the concerns of those around them with cynical indifference. The time loop challenges their cynicism by forcing them to experience, again and again, the grain of a single day.
A variation on the time loop plot can be seen in the show The Rehearsal (2022). The premise of this show is that a man named Nathan (played by the show’s creator, Nathan Fielder) has created a service designed to help people deal with an encounter they anticipate will be difficult.
The service allows them to “rehearse” the event in advance, so that when the real situation arrives they will be prepared. While filmed in the style of a documentary and seemingly realist in its texture, the show quickly reaches outlandish proportions.
In the first episode, a man has to come clean with a friend to whom he has lied about his level of education (saying he had an MA when in fact he only had a BA). Because this encounter will take place in a pub, Nathan builds a life-sized replica of this pub in a warehouse and hires a team of extras to play the staff and patrons.
He also hires an actress to covertly study the friend in question, so that the client can rehearse his confession with someone who will mimic her reactions and mannerisms. In this case, repetition is not brought about by a break in reality, but held (however ridiculously) in the frame of reality through the concept of “rehearsal”.
Knowing thyself
Is this kind of conceptual television something that arises with streaming? Or, does conceptual television simply continue a function that was previously undertaken by classic cinema and classic television, or indeed even older art forms such as prose, poetry, drama and the visual arts? Certainly, each of the premises canvassed here precedes the digital age.
The split-world premise can be traced, for instance, to the theme of the double (doppelgänger), made famous in 19th-century novels like Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The amnesia plot was a staple of Hollywood cinema. The time-loop plot has been in place since at least the 1990s.
Even so, the digital age has seen these plots gain new and sharper inflexions. The split-world premise now has a direct correlate in the split that exists between online and offline living.
Amnesia, insofar as it is premised on the loss of memory, now closely echoes the image of memory we know of in computer systems, which can be stored, deleted, transferred and corrupted. The amnesia plot in Homecoming, for instance, is premised on the idea that the experimental drug can locate, select and delete traumatic memories, as if they were independent files.
Repetition is also distinctive of the grammar of the digital age. Looping and sampling is now central to popular music. Even in a more common genre like dystopia, we can see the digital age inflecting these plots through the process of gamification. The logic of the game underpins hit dystopian shows like Squid Game (2021) or the zombie drama The Last of Us (2023), which is adapted from a popular videogame of the same name.
Another continuity contemporary streamed content shares with television in the broadcast era is its pedagogical orientation. Broadcast television instructs its viewers on the rules of living. This is most obvious in the lifestyle programming (gardening, renovation, cooking, dancing, travel) that remains a staple of current television.
A little surprisingly, however, the conceptual shows discussed here also involve an element of education. The heroes have all reached a point of arrest or crisis because there is something that they need to learn but cannot.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the novel incorporated education as an important element in its structure. Jane Austen’s Emma must learn that life is not a game to be watched, but one she must actually play. The mild scorn and amusement she held for those around her are substituted finally for an acceptance of her social role, which in her world was to marry.
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is a professor and the chair of Australian Literature at The University of Western Australia.
