Harmony Cobel is the manager of our nightmares. So why does she feel so relatable?
story by jennifer
image Apple TV+
“Cobel is deeply unhappy. She’s got a staff mutiny looming and a passive-aggressive board who won’t talk to her. Yet she does everything she can for the company. The dedication is endless. So is the anger.”
We’re obsessed with Apple TV+’s Severance. It’s the office serial that we didn’t know we wanted, but given the push by executives to get us back to our cubicles, obviously it’s the one we needed. It’s creepy, it’s dystopian, and it’s darkly funny.
If you haven’t seen it yet, let us get you up to speed. Mark, played by Adam Scott, loses his wife. He can’t cope with teaching anymore because he never took time off to properly grieve—relevant given how many people we lost in the pandemic—so he quits his job at a college and goes to work at a mysterious mega corporation with a program called Severance. Severance is a procedure that splits your brain into a work self (your innie) and a home self (your outie). Your two lives have no conscious awareness of each other. So when you’re at work, you’re only aware of your work life. When you’re home, you’re only aware of your home life.
It’s weird, we know, and also not a great strategy for grieving. But it does feel very American in its work centered-ness. We mean, couldn’t the innie be your in-the-world self?
Mark is put in charge of three employees whose jobs, it seems, is to look at numbers on a computer screen and decide whether the numbers feel good or bad. Kind of reminds us of the Lehman Brothers scandal. Those subprime mortgage numbers felt good to lenders until they definitely didn’t anymore.
And then there’s his nemesis, Harmony Cobel played by Patricia Arquette. Cobel is cold, inscrutable, and throws around a baby doll like nobody’s business. She’s in charge of Mark and answers to a board we never see.
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Cobel is deeply unhappy. She’s got a staff mutiny looming and a passive-aggressive board who won’t talk to her. Yet she does everything she can for the company. The woman definitely goes the extra mile. She swings by Mark’s place unannounced for tea, knows his trash day, and doubles as a lactation consultant for his sister. The dedication is endless. So is the anger.
She’s the boss of our nightmares and yet, if you’ve ever worked middle management, Harmony Corbel might seem…relatable?
A global survey showed middle managers (defined as those managing 1-6 people) are:
46% less satisfied with their jobs than senior executives
struggling more than twice as much as executives when it comes to maintaining a sense of belonging
more stressed than their more senior colleagues
They’re also more likely to experience depression and anxiety and take their work home with them.
And guess who is more likely to be a middle manager rather than a senior executive? You guessed it: women in their 40s and 50s.
Given this info, frankly, we’re surprised Harmony keeps it together as well as she does.
It’s the glass ceiling women can’t seem to crack. This is especially true if you’re a woman who is Black, Hispanic, Latina, Asian, or a member of LGBTQ+ community.
So, what’s a middle manager to do? Well, nothing. This isn’t your problem to fix. It’s theirs. And by theirs, we mean the higher ups. They should do it not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because diversifying who’s at the executive level creates a stronger, healthier company. A company that’s more likely to:
be open to change (a key to survival),
focus more on research & development rather than mergers & acquisitions (monopolies aren’t good for anyone other than Jeff, Elon, and those Koch brothers)
challenge the status quo (just say no to the status quo)
It’s a win win. So, to the mumbly board in Natalie’s ear we say: invest in diversifying who gets to advance beyond the mid-level. It’s going to save us all a lot of trouble.
Now, can we talk about Mr. Milcheck’s dance?