The first half hour of Severance’s pilot may mislead the viewer to mistake the show as workplace satire for prestige television.

However, should one commit, Dan Erickson’s magnum opus proves a fascinating study of our own crippling tendency to dissociate rather than experience reality head on.

Episodes unfold like rites, driven by restraint and slow escalation of dread for those trapped in the sinister Lumon Industries’ office space.

At the core of the show is the severance procedure, a chip that divides staff into an ‘innie’ who works in the office and an ‘outie’ who exists entirely independent, neither of which have any recollection of the others’ life.

Adam Scott plays Mark, a truly moving performance that charters a man’s slow acceptance that the pain he sought to escape from is an inexplicable part of who he is.

Britt Lower’s Helly is our dissenting voice, who’s ‘innie’ seeks to rebel from her entrapment.

Praise especially for Patricia Arquette’s formidable role as Harmony Cobel, the high priestess of the Lumon cabal, presiding over the severed floor with a Teutonic severity.

Of course, her appeal is plainly evident in resembling an almost universal experience of an icy superior many a viewer has themselves surely languished under.

Erickson drew the idea from his own dreary spell of office work, when he wished he could erase the hours between arriving and leaving.

The result carries the bureaucratic nightmare of Franz Kafka and the fractured minds of Charlie Kaufman, with Lumon’s cult for its founder Kier Eagan a mockery of the corporate ‘family’ while demanding devotion.

The second season, released after an arduous wait in the cold for three years, was triumphant.

Sweet Vitriol, the season’s eighth episode, ranks among its finest, yet the finale, Cold Harbor, claims the season outright. Erickson and his writers stage an ending of what can only be described, so as not to ruin its reveal, as one of ‘extraordinary nerve’.

Such was Severence’s success that I fear it leaves the third season with an almost insurmountable task, for Erickson has built a mystery so exact, and a world so fully realised, that any answer risks disappointing the questions it leaves behind.

A devoted audience has spent years dissecting every frame for clues, and it will accept nothing less than perfection.

Severance is available on Apple TV+.