“The Mystery of Your Youthful Energy”: Time, History, and the Representation of Queer Aging in Severance

This essay examines the Apple TV series Severance within the larger context of queer aging on television. It combines several contemporary theoretical frameworks of analysis and representation, including television studies, queer studies, and age studies. It argues that Severance’s representation of a queer-aging couple—played by Christopher Walken and John Turturro—diverges from prior norms of representation of both aging characters and of queer characters in television. This representation is emblematic of a new era of queer storytelling in television.