If you just started a TV show made in the last five years, there’s a good chance whatever you saw in episode 1 is going to be critically important to the finale. After all, how could it not be — the season only has six, or maybe eight or 10, episodes in total. The problem is, when every moment of a show is critical to its overall plot, the less we actually get to understand about the characters as people. But the fourth episode of Severance season 2 is a perfect reminder that TV wasn’t always like this. It used to make space for its characters and their lives and bizarre adventures that only existed to expose their personalities just a little bit more. And boy do I miss TV’s old ways.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Severance season 2 episode 4.]

Severance’s latest episode sends the Macrodata Refinement team on a field trip. The four members venture into a frozen wilderness for some camping, hiking, and good old-fashioned team building. The group traipses around the woods, encounters strange doubles of themselves, and gets to know each other a little better, and for the most part that’s the entire episode. It’s fun, refreshing, and exactly what TV has been missing for the last several years.

On its face, the tight narrative cohesion that short-season TV is built off of sounds like a strength. After all, Chekhov would tell us that the best narratives make economical use of their elements, letting nothing go to waste. But Chekhov wrote plays, not........

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