KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 23 — Imagine The Office and Black Mirror having a baby and you get an idea of what to expect from Apple TV+'s Severance.

Adam Scott plays Mark, a grieving widower who tries to get over his heartache by agreeing to a radical brain procedure that brings a darker meaning to the phrase "work-life balance.”

Lumen Industries requires the surgery, you see, before you are allowed to work on the super top secret, definitely not shady, floor where even the workers aren't sure what they're doing.

A special chip is inserted into a "severed” person's brain that effectively creates two separate personalities that the show calls (hilariously) innies and outies.

The innies are the "work you” and the outies are the person you are outside of work.

What the procedure does is completely disconnect the memories of each, meaning neither will remember nor know what the other does.

It's an interesting premise that Severance manages to mine quite deftly.

One particularly poignant scene is when an innie gets a glimpse of the life his alter ego has and asks why he can't have that too?

This sense of injustice about their plight drives other innies to try and find out just how the other side lives.

Modern parables

Scott turns in an excellent, understated performance as Mark who is grieving the loss of his best friend at work while, unknown to himself, he is still weeping every day over the death of his wife in a car accident.

As the show progresses, Mark finds that literally splitting himself apart to deal with his brokenness isn't what he needs.

His coming to terms with his grief is one of the better threads in the show though one weakness of Severance is just how much it throws at you as it goes along.

At its heart, Severance is a treatise on just how much work, especially the corporate life, demands from workers to the point of dehumanisation.

The separation of work from life, this compartmentalisation is seen as this perfect ideal but Severance asks what it costs workers.

You could also draw parallels to the corpus callosotomy procedure that severs the connection between the left and right hemisphere of the brain, creating a situation where the left side doesn't know what the other is doing and vice-versa.

While people who have undergone the surgery have managed to live fruitful lives, they would still have a different perception of the world ― in fact two different perceptions instead of a unified whole that most of us take for granted.

In the same vein, the show demonstrates how the severance procedure does more harm than good as the innies realise just how fractured their living experience is and how much they're missing.

Severance is an embarrassment of riches where acting performances are concerned with great performances all around; Patricia Arquette is show-stealing as the micromanaging, quietly unhinged supervisor.

Tramell Tilman as Arquette's right hand man is terrifyingly unnerving as the constantly smiling and yet still menacing HR person from hell.

I have the softest spot for John Turtorro as long-timer Irving who had been quite happy to accept the smallest crumbs until a chance meeting with Christopher Walken's Burt.

One complaint I do have with the show is the first episode's pacing that could easily alienate viewers.

However, the show really hits its stride from the third episode onwards with many a plot twist and revelation to keep things interesting.

If Black Mirror didn't turn you off with its dark imaginings, Severance is a rewarding watch that makes you care a lot about its office workers who just really want to be whole and truly in touch with themselves.

Severance also asks a most important question: why should we feel the pressure to become different people at work in the first place?

It's also fitting that it comes out during a time when many people are reassessing just what work means to them.

Come for the drollness but stay to find out just what will happen to the characters in Severance, who make it really easy to care.

Watch the trailer for Severance, out now on Apple TV+, below.