An office job you cannot remember
Dan Erickson came up with Severance while stuck in dull jobs in his twenties, daydreaming about skipping the working day entirely and arriving straight at home time. His script eventually reached the actor and director Ben Stiller, who directed most of the episodes, and the series began on Apple's streaming service in February 2022. It is a slow, strange thriller with grown-up themes, best for older teenagers and adults.
The idea is simple and unsettling. Workers at LUMON Industries have had a SEVERED procedure, a chip in the brain that splits their memories in two. Their INNIE, the version who exists at work, has never seen daylight outside the office, and their OUTIE, the version who goes home, has no idea what they do all day. The switch happens in the ELEVATOR between the car park and the office floor. The title sequence, in which a cartoon Mark is stretched, copied and swallowed by his own workplace, sets the tone before a word is spoken.
Scary numbers and waffle parties
MARK, played by Adam Scott, leads a small team in the MACRODATA Refinement DEPARTMENT, along with the new recruit HELLY, the loyal IRVING, played by John Turturro, and the competitive DYLAN. Their work is to stare at screens of NUMBERS and sort the ones that feel scary into digital bins, and nobody, including the viewers, is told what it is for. Mark's old colleague PETEY, who has left the company, is the first sign that something is badly wrong.
Lumon rewards its workers with small, odd treats: finger traps, a melon bar, a Music Dance Experience and, for the best performers, a WAFFLE party. The founder, KIER Eagan, is treated almost like a religious figure, with a handbook of his sayings and a wing of the building full of statues. The manager, Harmony COBEL, played by Patricia Arquette, and her smiling deputy, Seth MILCHICK, watch everything, and WELLNESS sessions soothe the innies with pleasant facts about their outies that tell them almost nothing. BURT, played by Christopher Walken, runs the Optics and Design department down the corridor.
Outside, Mark's sister DEVON and her husband RICKEN, a writer of self-help books, try to work out what the job is doing to him.
A real building from 1962
The outside of Lumon is a real place: the former Bell Labs research centre in Holmdel, New Jersey, designed by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen for a telephone company's scientists and opened in 1962. Its enormous mirrored-glass walls and long, echoing corridors suited the show perfectly. After the scientists moved out in the 2000s it stood empty for years, before reopening as offices, shops and restaurants. Our architects page includes Saarinen among its names.
Goats and a long wait
The second series did not arrive until January 2025, nearly three years later, delayed partly by the Hollywood strikes of 2023. When it did, it became the streaming service's most watched series, overtaking Ted Lasso, and later that year it won several Emmys, including awards for Britt Lower, who plays Helly, and Tramell Tillman, who plays Milchick.
One of its strangest puzzles is a room full of GOATS, looked after by a department whose purpose the show took a whole series to explain.