Severance Turns Banal Office Culture Into A Thrilling Mystery

Apple TV+’s new thriller series Severance will have you scouring Google for answers. Created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller, the show stars Adam Scott as Mark, an employee at Lumon Industries who underwent a surgical procedure that divides his memories between his work and personal lives. In other words, when Mark arrives at his office, he can only remember what’s happened there and knows nothing of his outside life. And by the time he steps out of his office building at the end of the workday, he’s forgotten everything that happened inside of it.

After a co-worker Mark was particularly close with is suddenly fired and a woman arrives to replace him, he and his fellow employees begin to question their circumstances — and what they’re even working on. This leads them down a rabbit hole of mysteries — all of which, unfortunately, you’ll have to patiently watch unfold. Though the show seems like something ripped out of a juicy sci-novel, Severance is not based on a book. There is a satirical sci-fi novel called Severance that’s set during the pandemic and was published in 2018. It was quite popular after its release, even winning the 2018 Kirkus Prize for fiction. And it has recently come back into the public conversation for obvious reasons. But while the book is also a work of science fiction that touches on themes of office culture, it is unrelated to the AppleTV+ show.

Instead, the TV series explores the implications of the “severance” procedure on the lives of Mark and his colleagues and how quickly things start to go wrong when they start looking for answers. “It’s an experience that is universal, that people can identify with,” Stiller explained of the story to Geek Culture. “This idea of wanting to cut off when they go to work every day and do the things they don’t want to do and not experience the pain of life. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just flip a switch and not have to experience boredom?”