Severance

Season 1 left you with questions and not many answers. And this season was spent answering all sorts of questions from season 1

I certainly didn't get that feeling. For every Season 1 question they answered, they raised 3 more in Season two. I found it very unsatisfying for most episodes this season to get to the end of an episode with little to know forward movement in the reveal.

Both seasons really slow down and let you soak in the artistry.

I have no problem with a slow paced show, but its got to move forward. I started getting annoyed with the lack of forward progress and the artistry lost its value and simply was an annoyance. For the second half of the season I found myself on the 10-second-skip-foward button for a good chunk of the episodes.

Sure, I said REwatched though.

Your reply implied that the reason you disagreed was because you'd just rewatched the entire season again, as if doing so somehow added further weight to your argument. Fair enough if you didn't feel this week to week either, but stating this after the fact feels like goalpost shifting to me. I think my point still stands - binge watching the entire season doesn't make you any more of an expert with regards to potential pacing issues, and in fact is more likely to obscure them.

Do you feel like the pacing was any different from season 1?

Yes, absolutely. The most notable difference is that it was much more consistent. Season 2 is all over the place, in terms of pacing within episodes but also with its setups and pay-offs. It jumps around a lot more and has multiple episodes that are completely severed (pun intended) from the previous episode, to the extent that I sometimes felt like I'd missed an episode or forgot to finish the last one. It is too often verbose in its storytelling, taking a long time to get to the point and there are countless scenes that drag on far too long. It many instances they tried to disguise this by making shots as visually striking/creative as possible, which led to constant praise from some about the cinematography. But to me, great cinematography is not about making a scene visually interesting - it's actually about using visuals to enhance the ideas or emotions of the narrative. It's about communicating something to your audience. Season 2 consistently fails to do this because there is often not much there to enhance. It is shallow television, pretending to be deeper and more interesting than it actually is (relative to its runtime).

To me, Season 2 is much more stereotypical mystery box television in the sense that it spends a lot of time distracting you with new questions and mini twists whilst rarely delivering conclusions to anything that has come before. This is a genre that is notorious for farming engagement through convoluted and confusing storytelling and overloading viewers with questions to generate discussion and fan theories that keep them engaged to see if their predictions were correct. Season 1 was a much more interesting and unique blend of comedy and thriller, gradually transitioning from one into the other as the season progressed. The narrative was a lot tighter; it asked questions but in moderation, and you always understood their relevance to the characters and their stories. To some extent you are always going to have a broadening of scope as a multi-season serial progresses, particularly when it transitions into a more serious genre as Season 1 did. However, the gap between the end of Season 1 and the end of Season 2 is just way too big for me to believe this is a natural progression of the original story. I think it has clearly been a victim of artificial inflation due to the unexpected success of the first season and the subsequent pressure to turn this into a massive moneymaker going forward.