Stephen C.
Last week, the Stephen Colbert show did a wonderful parody of the Apple TV+ series, Severance. If you haven't seen the show, the specific jokes won't have any meaning, but you should still get the general idea of the humor since Colbert sets it up pretty well. (The short version it's a dystopian future where people can choose to be "severed" or not -- that's when outside of work, they have no idea what they did inside the corporation that does the severing. And inside at work, they have absolutely no idea about anything of their life in the outside world, including their name. There's much more than that, but it's the basics.)
If you have seen the show, though, you'll be boggled by what a great job they did. I won't explain why, however, since discovering that is half the fun. Though I'll discuss it below the video -- if you don't want to know anything, just skip it before watching.
I'll just note they went to great effort to do it very right. It's really full-blown -- and it's not just a few jokes, but goes for 6-1/2 minutes.
What I don't know is why they did the elaborate sketch? The show finished its first season run several months ago, and the second season hasn't even been announced yet. Of course, it doesn't matter why, because the sketch is wonderful. It's just a curious thing.
Okay, just a few thoughts on the lengths they went to make this so good.
When the sketch begins, it looks like what they did was edit Stephen Colbert's image into existing footage of the show. That's the sort of thing that parody sketches tend to do.
But they didn't do that. They created a fresh sketch. And got most of the main actors from the show to participate. That image above isn't Stephen Colbert edited into a scene that John Turturro had been in. Turturro is recreating his character for the sketch. As did other main actors from the show.
They clearly also got the original Severance sets. And, as far as I can tell from what Colbert says, it seems like they didn't just get the actors, but I think that Ben Stiller -- who directed the series -- directed this little film. I can't be sure, but Colbert includes him in his thanks, and Stiller doesn't appear in the sketch.
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