When it premiered in 2022, Apple TV 's surreal workplace show was a hit. Now it's finally back – and from the playful storytelling to the layered performances, there's a lot to savour.

In the second season of Severance, one character spends hours practising how to put paper clips on properly (apparently there's a right and a wrong way). Other characters find a room full of goats in their office building, and out of the office someone finds a working phone booth on the street, as if that's an everyday thing. Yet viewers of season one of the series – among the most bracing and imaginative of recent years – know that its bizarro world is also relatable to anyone who has ever been bored at their job.

With a perfect balance of the real and surreal, the show follows four employees who sort numbers floating on their computer screens at Lumon Industries, and who chose to have a chip put in their brains that cuts their memories in half. The person working inside the office, called the innie, has no knowledge of who they are beyond its walls – and their outside counterpart, or outie, has no memory of the working day. Identity crisis doesn't begin to describe it. The show's creator, Dan Erickson, was inspired by wishing that his tedious office temp job while he was a struggling screenwriter could zoom by as if it never happened, and his idea of being able to turn off your brain resonates especially well in our age of information overload.

That twist on the familiar office-show premise is a great hook. But the series' true alchemy, and the secret of its success and acclaim, is how well it builds our emotional attachment to the characters in Lumon's Macrodata Refinement Department, who now realise they have made a terrible mistake. The cast makes them so credible that it's easy to empathize with the grief-stricken widower Mark (Adam Scott), fussy and lovelorn Irving (John Turturro), rebellious Helly (Britt Lower), and Dylan (Zach Cherry), an office drone who seemed hapless until he wasn't. Some series shake things up radically between seasons, but this is a seamless continuation that works the same magic with even more mind-bending turns.

The plot picks up five months after the cliffhanging events we last saw, when Dylan stayed behind at Lumon Industries and laboriously held a switch that allowed the other three to briefly access their work memories while outside. Mark discovered that his wife, Gemma, might actually be alive, and is someone he encountered without recognising at work. Irv is an artist who for some reason has documents about Lumon employees hidden in his apartment. Most........

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