Latest news with #MissHuang
New York Times
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What Was That Strange Asian Child Doing in the ‘Severance' Office?
Pity the American office worker: overworked, undervalued and kept in the dark about the true intentions of his employer, which are somehow weirder and more odious than he could possibly know. The beauty of the corporate-culture satire 'Severance' lies in just how universal, how quotidian, its protagonist's gripes are. On some cosmic level, Mark Scout wants to investigate the aims of his mysteriously tight-lipped company. Day to day, though, he must slog away at unsatisfying and impenetrable tasks, browbeaten by a series of cold, uncaring bosses. Who hasn't been there? This season made a curious new addition to that line of Big Bad Bosses — a puzzle-box of a character, more loaded with menace than any of the middle managers who came before. Introduced, without fanfare, in the season's premiere, 'Miss Huang' is a steely Asian girl who, despite not looking old enough to enter PG-13 movies on her own, is apparently responsible for managing Mark and his adult colleagues. 'Why are you a child?' someone asks, to which she only replies: 'Because of when I was born.' Miss Huang is given no further explanation. She orders employees around, unsmiling, in her prim adolescent voice and middle-schooler knee socks, then plays with a hand-held water-ring-toss toy at her desk, all the more chilling for her lack of justification. But we are meant to make some assumptions. Miss Huang is orderly, diligent, quick-witted. She shows not a pinch of personality, so her talents must lie in sheer intelligence or efficacy. We can infer by her position that she has excelled beyond her years in some way — that she is precocious, perhaps even a prodigy. Standing quietly in the corner, eyeing the staff, she occasionally looks forlorn, a kind of executive waif, yet the overall effect is of sinister vigilance. You suspect coiled ambition, backstabbery in waiting. 'When I played her, I didn't feel very scary,' the actress Sarah Bock said in an interview. 'But at the end of the day, crew members would come up to me like: 'You freaked me out. You're terrifying.'' Watching this strange corporate poppet float around all season long, injecting scenes with an aura of ominous efficiency and little else, I kept having the thought that I knew her, somehow. And we have seen Miss Huang before — shades of her, at least. We have seen her in model students like Sanjay Patel on 'Modern Family,' Cho Chang in 'Harry Potter' (a Ravenclaw, naturally) and all the nameless TV Asian kids who effortlessly win spelling bees or chess tournaments. We have seen the top-of-their-class Asian doctors of 'Grey's Anatomy,' 'House' and 'E.R.' We have seen punchlines of ultracapability like 'Asian Annie' on 'Community' — the only person able to usurp the already-overachieving white Annie — or the high-ponytailed Joy Lin on 'Girls,' who gets picked for a job over Lena Dunham's Hannah because, while less personable, she knows how to use Adobe Photoshop. There is the corrupt accountant Lau in 'The Dark Knight,' to whom Gotham's mob bosses outsource their money laundering because he is 'good with calculation,' and the geneticist Dr. Henry Wu, whose brilliance unleashes the hell of 'Jurassic Park.' These are all wildly different characters in wildly different entertainments, but their Asianness is deployed to the same effect: as a shorthand for intellectual ability and über-proficiency. This trope is so familiar, in fact, that we often see it playfully inverted. Across the six seasons of 'Silicon Valley,' the Chinese software engineer Jian-Yang is repeatedly mistaken for a brilliant, devious plotter, but his enigmatic behavior and deadpan speech turn out to be mostly bog-standard naïveté. To Tom Holland's Spider-Man, the schlubby Asian nerd Ned proves more vital as a friend than as a genius hacker. On 'Gilmore Girls,' the Korean character Lane grows up tiger-mothered only to end up becoming a rock musician, while her white best friend overfixates on academics. In the recent movie 'Mickey 17,' Steven Yuen's character is openly scheming yet also comically hapless at that scheming. With Miss Huang, 'Severance' gives us an especially eerie spin on the original archetype. At first, it seems her Asianness might be unimportant. But other parts of the season pointedly plumb the racial politics of the workplace. A Black manager, given an artwork of the company's white chief executive in blackface, has to swallow his disgust, while another Black character in the room beams a strained smile; afterward, he rapidly grows disenchanted with his job. So what is the hypercompetent Asian child in the corner meant to signify? Her youth feels like the key. An overproficient Asian adult is one thing, but de-aged into a child and given power over a professional setting, the overexcelling model minority goes from annoying to contemptible. Mark and his colleagues are visibly irritated by Miss Huang, questioning her credentials, scowling at her policing of others, rejecting her (quite useful) suggestion to stop a nosebleed with petroleum jelly. Miss Huang's presence feels wrong, unnatural, threatening in a heightened way. The interloping Asians of Hollywood's past tended to be caricatures of pure evil or buffoonery — Fu Manchu in the former category, Long Duk Dong of 'Sixteen Candles' and Mr. Yunioshi of 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' in the latter — but the threat Miss Huang poses is more spectral. What she seems to portend, to the entire office, is a beady, competitive superintelligence. Her menace is her own capability. This anxiety has its own baggy history. In 1882, it was resentment against cheap and efficient Chinese laborers that led to the nation's first law barring immigration from a specific racial group. In the decades since, as Asians in the United States have ascended across various white-collar professions, becoming all but synonymous with 'achievement,' those same xenophobic fears and worries have ballooned outward from menial labor and into all jobs having to do with desks and computers and the intellect — leaving a share of suspicious Americans feeling like John Henry, their livelihoods jeopardized by some cold, inhuman steam engine of Asian aptitude. For the better part of the last decade, Harvard University battled a lawsuit accusing it of discrimination against Asian students in its admissions process, with plaintiffs claiming the school gave Asians' test scores less value than traits like courage, kindness and 'personality' — and in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that this bias was real, bringing about the eradication of affirmative action. 'Severance' toys, rather heartbreakingly, with exactly this prejudice. Midseason, in a fit of juvenile pique after not being allowed to play the theremin at a retirement party, Miss Huang, it is implied, rats out a fellow manager for improperly stapling papers. She doesn't bring this matter up to their C-suite superiors for her own gain, though. She is simply doing her job and maybe seeking a bit of petty revenge. Then her plot arc completely deflates; this minor insouciance is her sole moment of true menace. By the season's close, it is clear that she is not some conniving mastermind after all — merely a middle-management pawn, tasked with overseeing people she has no particular interest in outcompeting. But the show generally asks us to see the world through Mark's everyman-American-worker eyes. It's to him, and his peers, that Miss Huang seems like a scheming figure whose very presence invites concern — provoking a common set of American insecurities about the type of person she might be, even if she is not. 'Severance' never seems to fully recognize what it is doing here. Yet in using the precocious Asian character to invoke something forbidding, it triggers the classic model-minority curse: You are prized for proficiency and just as often rejected for it. Even if you're just a child.
USA Today
20-03-2025
- Business
- USA Today
Apple losing over $1 billion a year on streaming service, the Information reports
Apple losing over $1 billion a year on streaming service, the Information reports Show Caption Hide Caption Sarah Bock on her role as Miss Huang in 'Severance' Just 15 when she auditioned for Apple TV+'s "Severance," Sarah Bock is now a college student juggling work and school. Apple AAPL.O is losing more than $1 billion a year on its streaming service, the Information reported on Thursday, citing two people familiar with the matter. The tech giant has spent more than $5 billion a year on content since launching Apple TV+ in 2019 but trimmed it by around $500 million last year, the report said. Apple did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Apple TV+, known for original shows such as "Ted Lasso", "The Morning Show", "Shrinking", and "Severance", has lagged behind rivals Netflix NFLX.O, Disney+ DIS.N and Prime Video AMZN.O in terms of subscribers. iPhone 16e review: I used Apple's newest phone for a week. Here's how it compares. Industry leader Netflix had a total subscriber count of 301.63 million, according to the latest data, while Disney+ had 124.6 million users followed by Warner Bros Discovery at 116.9 million. The iPhone maker does not break down the subscribers for Apple TV+ but it is estimated to have reached 40.4 million at the end of 2024, according to five analysts polled by Visible Alpha. Apple TV+ productions have earned more than 2,500 nominations and 538 wins, CEO Tim Cook said in a post earnings call in January. As competition heats up in the streaming industry, media companies are increasingly bundling their services at discounted rates to appeal to price-conscious consumers. Apple TV+ is part of a bundle offered by Comcast CMCSA.O that combines the service with Peacock and Netflix at $15 per month. Apple TV+ costs $9.99 per month in the U.S when bought separately. The Cupertino, California-based company also bundles Apple TV+ with services such as iCloud, Apple Music and others under the Apple One program. Reporting by Akash Sriram and Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza and Sriraj Kalluvila
USA Today
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Would you get the 'Severance' procedure? Is work-life balance real? Tell us.
Would you get the 'Severance' procedure? Is work-life balance real? Tell us. | Opinion 'Severance' concludes Season 2 this week and the show has gotten our outies thinking: What does work-life balance mean, and is it even possible? Tell us what you think. Show Caption Hide Caption Sarah Bock on her role as Miss Huang in 'Severance' Just 15 when she auditioned for Apple TV+'s "Severance," Sarah Bock is now a college student juggling work and school. Your outie wants work-life balance, and Lumon Industries is here to give it to you. (Praise Kier.) Or at least, that's the idea behind 'Severance,' which concludes its second season on Apple TV+ Friday. The show your friends can't stop talking about has tapped into something everyone – working or not – can relate to. For the uninitiated, 'Severance' follows a team of office workers whose selves – and memories – have been divided between their work life ('innies') and their personal life ('outies') thanks to a surgical procedure. Innies and outies exist at the same time, but they never see or interact with each other or anyone outside of their worlds: Innie you goes to work, and outie you has no idea what you do there. (In fact, all your innie knows is work.) It's compartmentalization to the extreme and, as you can probably guess – no spoilers! – that separation doesn't quite go as promised. 'Would you implant a chip/take a pill/have a procedure that would allow you to xyz' is a common theme in science fiction. The show's iteration has sparked a heated debate online and left us wondering: Would you get the severance procedure? (Scroll down or click here to tell us.) 'Severance' debuted in February 2022 and was shot during the pandemic, a particularly tumultuous time for rigid corporate America. Years after COVID-19 forced many companies to go remote, millions of employees were still working from home – adding another layer to the complexities of the work-life balance debate. When the second season started streaming this January, it was against a new backdrop of corporate culture. Some of the most well-known and formerly work-from-home friendly companies, including JPMorgan Chase and Amazon, now want employees back in the office. Federal employees weren't exempt from this, either. The Trump administration ordered thousands of workers to return to office as the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency began their layoffs. But hybrid work remains on the rise, and remote work – in some form – looks to be here to stay. New data from WFH Research shows that all workers are working from home an average of 1.4 days a week, and 43% of offices have implemented a hybrid structure. Take our poll: Gen Z is having fewer kids. Does declining US birth rate worry you? Tell us. | Opinion Forum It seems companies are giving their people what they want: A Pew Research Center survey found that nearly half of people who work from home would leave their jobs if they were forced to go back to the office. And it's not just employees who benefit. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that as remote work increases, productivity increases. I think they call that a win-win? At USA TODAY, a lot of us are watching and talking about 'Severance' and its commentary on our relationship to work and ourselves, the innie vs. outie of it all. We want to know what you think: Do you feel like you have a healthy work-life balance? What should companies do to better support their employees in their pursuit of this? Do you think work from home is working? What makes an ideal working environment – and a bad one? Take our latest Forum survey below or send us an email to forum@ with the subject line 'Forum work life balance.' We'll publish perspectives from all sides in an upcoming column. Is it even possible to have a work-life balance? Tell us. Janessa Hilliard is the director of audience for Opinion at Gannett.
USA Today
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Who is Miss Huang? Meet the college freshman behind the eerily young 'Severance' character
Who is Miss Huang? Meet the college freshman behind the eerily young 'Severance' character "I kind of felt like I was severed in a way because I had so many different things to focus on, but it was all really fun," Sarah Bock says of balancing high school and filming "Severance." Show Caption Hide Caption Sarah Bock on her role as Miss Huang in 'Severance' Just 15 when she auditioned for Apple TV+'s "Severance," Sarah Bock is now a college student juggling work and school. When Sarah Bock first walked onto Northwestern University's campus last fall, she was just another freshman, excited for new classes and friends. But now, Bock finds herself being stopped more regularly by fans of her first true onscreen role. Bock, 18, is a theater and psychology major at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. But she is better known for her role as Miss Huang in Season 2 of the Apple TV+ original series, "Severance." Directed by Ben Stiller and starring Adam Scott, "Severance" is the top streaming series on Apple TV+. The first season of the thriller debuted in 2022, and after a jaw-dropping cliffhanger, fans eagerly anticipated the release of its second in January. The season finale streams March 21, but fans said goodbye to the eerily rigid Miss Huang during this week's penultimate episode. More: When does the next episode of 'Severance' come out? Season 2 schedule, where to watch In the first episode this season, Miss Eustace Huang is the new deputy manager of the severed floor, taking over the role from Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), who was promoted to floor manager. Despite her often-questioned young age, Miss Huang is quiet and follows the rules of Lumon Industries closely. 'It was fun to have this sort of unexpected young person down there," Stiller says. "She's just very inscrutable in the way that so many of the Lumon managerial people are.' Bock says she's enjoyed watching this season with friends and reflecting on memories that began more than three years ago. It all started with 'Winnie the Pooh' Bock says her first acting gig, at age 5, was a children's theater production of "Winnie the Pooh" in her hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. What kept her coming back to the stage was the community and ability to convey important messages. "As I've gotten older, I've been able to recognize the power of it more, which makes me love it even more," she says. "I've started to learn more about the art that I respond to and want to create." Auditioning at 15, becoming a fan A common talking point for Bock's role is her age ― both in and out of character. In Miss Huang's opening scene, in which she introduces herself to members of the severed floor, Mark Wilkins (Bob Balaban), an employee at least 50 years her senior, asks, "Why are you a child?" To which Miss Huang famously replies, with absolutely no emotion, "Because of when I was born." She auditioned for "Severance" at 15, sending a self-shot tape in which she read through that first scene. About a month later, she hopped on a Zoom call with Stiller. A month after that, she flew to New York to read through a few scenes with Tillman. Miss Huang interacts mostly with Mr. Milchick throughout the season. Ahead of getting the role, Bock said she'd never watched an episode of the show, but her parents were fans. "I hadn't personally watched it, but I had walked into the back of the living room a couple times when they (parents) watched it and I was like, 'Oh, the guy from 'The Good Place' looks different. What is the show?'" Bock says, referring to star Adam Scott. "But the night I got the audition, I binged the entire first season in one sitting just because I got so invested and became a huge fan." By the time production began on Season 2, Bock was 16, and still in high school. Her scenes were mostly filmed at sound stages in the Bronx, with a seven-month hiatus due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. "It was a long, long time and obviously, there was a break in between, but I feel like even in the show you can kind of see I grew up a little bit," Bock says. "It's kind of crazy to watch." Initially, she continued her enrollment at a North Carolina public school system during filming, but eventually she transferred to a hybrid magnet school, which allowed her to take high-school classes online. She'd film for an hour or so and then squeeze in about 30 minutes of schoolwork before returning to the set. "I kind of felt like I was severed in a way because I had so many different things to focus on, but it was all really fun," Bock says. Getting into character Sitting in her college dorm room, Bock is cheerful and bubbly, in contrast to Miss Huang's persona. "I would hope that I'm pretty different from her," Bock says. "I definitely wouldn't be able to stare down John Turturro (Irving B.) or Tramell Tillman in the way Miss Huang does in the show." To get in the "Miss Huang headspace," Bock analyzed the performances of Tillman and Patricia Arquette (Harmony Cobel), who play strict upper management characters. She also listened to a Spotify playlist of "intense, dark songs" featuring the Theremin, an instrument she plays in a few episodes. The Miss Huang conspiracies A character introduced without warning and with little to no backstory has resulted in a whirlwind of Miss Huang conspiracies. Is she a clone? Is she the child of Mark and Gemma? Bock says she hears a theory that Miss Huang is a robot the most. "I'll get DMs from people just saying, 'You are a robot.' Nothing else," she said. By the ninth episode, Miss Huang's exit, fans still don't know much about the character. But they learn she's a student at the Myrtle Eagen School for Girls, the same cultish boarding school Harmony Cobel attended as a child. At the end of the episode, she's given a Jame Eagan bust, also given to Cobel many years earlier. She is then sent on her way, earmuffs and all, to start her next chapter with Lumon Industries. Balancing college finals, interviews with Jimmy Kimmel Bock spent her first semester at Northwestern University under the radar, making friends and soaking up the college experience before her face would be displayed on TVs across the world. Bock's social media features traditional group photos with her girlfriends, accompanied by "Severance" promotional media and then most recently, clips from an interview with Jimmy Kimmel earlier this month. "I kind of feel like Hannah Montana, the best of both worlds right now," Bock said, laughing. "I mean, today I had a final for one of my classes and then I came here and I'm doing some interviews." How to watch Season 2 of 'Severance' The Season 2 finale streams March 20 in the U.S. and globally on March 21. "Severance" is available for streaming on Apple TV+ with a paid subscription. Contributing: Gary Levin
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The child boss in ‘Severance' reveals a devastating truth about work and child-rearing in the 21st century
In the second season of 'Severance,' there's an unexpected character: a child supervisor named Miss Huang, who matter-of-factly explains she's a child 'because of when I was born.' Miss Huang's deadpan response is more than just a clever quip. Like so much in the Apple TV+ series, which has broken viewership records for the streaming service, I think it reveals a devastating truth about the role of work in the 21st century. As a scholar of childhood studies, I also see historical echoes: What constitutes a 'child' – and whether one gets to claim childhood at all – has always depended on when and where a person is born. Americans are deeply invested in the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, with kids protected by doting adults from the harsh realities of work and making ends meet. However, French historian Philippe Ariès famously argued that childhood, as many understand it today, simply did not exist in the past. Using medieval art as one resource, Ariès pointed out that children were often portrayed as miniature adults, without special attributes, such as plump features or silly behaviors, that might mark them as fundamentally different from their older counterparts. Looking at baptism records, Ariès also discovered that many parents gave siblings the same name, and he explained this phenomenon by suggesting that devastatingly high child mortality rates prevented parents from investing the sort of love and affection in their children that's now considered a core component of parenthood. While historians have debated many of Ariès' specific claims, his central insight remains powerful: Our modern understanding of childhood as a distinct life stage characterized by play, protection and freedom from adult responsibilities is a relatively recent historical development. Ariès argued that children didn't emerge as a focus of unconditional love until the 17th century. The belief that a child deserves a life free from the stress of the workplace came along still later. After all, if Miss Huang had been born in the 19th century, few people would question her presence in the workplace. The Industrial Revolution yielded accounts of children working 16-hour days and accorded no special protection because of their tender age and emotional vulnerability. Well into the 20th century, children younger than Miss Huang routinely worked in factories, mines and other dangerous environments. To today's viewers of 'Severance,' the presence of a child supervisor in the sterile, oppressive workplace of the show's fictional Lumon Industries feels jarring precisely because it violates the deeply held belief that children are occupants of a separate sphere, their innocence shielding them from the dog-eat-dog environs of competitive workplaces. As a child worker, Miss Huang might seem like an uncanny ghost of a bygone era of childhood. But I think she's closer to a prophet: Her role as child-boss warns viewers about what a work-obsessed future holds. Today, the ideal childhood – access to play, care and a meaningful education – is increasingly under threat. As politicians and policymakers insist that children are the future, many of them refuse to support the intensive caregiving required to transform newborns into functioning adults. As philosopher Nancy Fraser has argued, capitalism relies on someone doing that work, while assigning it little to no monetized value. Child-rearing in the 21st century exists within a troubling paradox: Mothers provide unpaid child care for their own children, while those who professionally care for others' children – predominantly women of color and immigrants – receive meager compensation for this essential work. In other words, economic elites and the politicians they support say they want to cultivate future workers. But they don't want to fund the messy, inefficient, time-consuming process that raising modern children requires. The show's name comes from a 'severance' procedure that workers undergo to separate their work memories from their personal ones. It offers a darkly comic version of work-life balance, with Lumon office workers able to completely disconnect their work selves from their personalities off the clock. Each is distinct: A character's 'innie' is the person they are at the job, and their 'outtie' is who they are at home. I see this as an apt metaphor for how market capitalism seeks to separate the slow, patient work required to raise children and care for other loved ones from the cold-eyed pursuit of economic efficiency. Parents are expected to work as if they don't have children and raise children as if they don't work. The result is a system that makes traditional notions of childhood – with its unwieldy dependencies, its inefficient play and its demands for attention and care – increasingly untenable. Plummeting global fertility rates around the world speak to this crisis in child care, with the U.S., Europe, South Korea and China falling well below the birth rate required to replace the existing population. Even as Elon Musk frets about women choosing not to have children, he seems eager to restrict any government aid that would provide the time or resources that raising children requires. Accessible health care, affordable, healthy food and stable housing are out of the reach of many. The current administration's quest for what it calls 'government efficiency' is poised to shred safety net programs that help millions of low-income children. In the midst of this dilemma, Miss Huang offers a surreal solution to the problems children pose in 2025. She is, in many ways, capitalism's ideal child. Already a productive worker as a tween, she requires no parent's time, no teacher's patience and no community's resources. Like other workers and executives at Lumon, she seems to have shed the inefficient entanglements of family, love and play. In this light, Miss Huang's clever insistence that she is a child 'because of when I was born' is darkly prophetic. In a world where every moment must be productive, where caregiving is systematically devalued and where human relationships are subordinated to market logic, Miss Huang represents a future where childhood survives only as a date on a birth certificate. All the other attributes are economically impractical. Viewers don't yet know if she's severed. But at least from the perspective of the other workers in the show, Miss Huang works ceaselessly and, in doing so, proves that she is no child at all. Or rather, she is the only kind of child that America's economic system allows to thrive. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut Read more: How did public bathrooms get to be separated by sex in the first place? Why female bosses get different reactions than men when they criticize employees 'Great resignation'? 'Quiet quitting'? If you're surprised by America's anti-work movement, maybe you need to watch more movies Anna Mae Duane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
