If you are a fan of the show “Severance,” maybe you’ve had this experience where you try to recommend the show to somebody and you realize you’re not quite sure how to describe it.
There’s the basic premise: Four people work at a company called Lumen Industries, and none of them know what the company does. But it’s more complicated than that.
The reason they don’t know is that they’ve all had this medical procedure — called severance — that divides their brain into two distinct identities: an “innie,” which is the version of themselves that only exists at the office; and an “outie,” the version that exists in the outside world. Their identities switch every time they get on the elevator at Lumen Industries.
But the part of severance that’s hard to express is that even though it’s set in a sterile corporate environment, it somehow feels like you’re watching a horror movie. There’s this vibrating sense of tension and foreboding that pervades the series as the mystery of what Lumen really does — and whether severance is reversible — gradually unfolds.
It’s incredibly unnerving to watch and totally intoxicating. For our pop culture expert Amanda Kehrberg, part of the show’s seductive power has to do with its production design.
Full conversation
AMANDA KEHRBERG: The aesthetics are so comforting to me. It makes me so happy. There’s just ritual and simplicity and kind of like light jazz music, like you’re always in an elevator.
SAM DINGMAN: Let’s talk about the aesthetics, though a little bit more, because it’s one of those things that the show has thought about at such a deep level.
KEHRBERG: It almost feels like being in like, like a ’90s Microsoft screensaver in some ways. There are so many just blank white hallways. Everything is bright, bright, bright. And then you look around and just the way that they have these like, Romantic-era paintings of the internal work history. Their … internal comms all look like mid-century Soviet propaganda posters.
DINGMAN: So much of the show, to my mind, is making fun of this idea of corporate culture, and it really foregrounds it in this way of having these oil paintings with stark, emotionless Soviet design. These things make so little sense next to each other, much like the words corporate and culture.
One of the things I was reminded of that I had sort of forgotten about aesthetically in watching the first episode of season two, is the work that the main characters of the show are doing in their department, which is called macro data refinement — which is another sort of wonderfully meaningless phrase — is they just have this grid of numbers. And they kind of scroll a mouse over the numbers, and eventually they click and some of the numbers go tumbling into this animated bucket, and then a little chime sounds that indicates that they did it right. It’s absurdly meaningless.
KEHRBERG: Oh yes, it’s wonderful.
DINGMAN: But to me, what the show does in such an interesting way is explore that space that you were alluding to earlier, that there are some people who actually kind of crave that, who crave that opportunity to to kind of tune out for a little while, but then you start to wonder what you’re a part of.
KEHRBERG: I mean, that sort of sense of escapism certainly is something we all crave in media. The way that we watch things, we’re never fully sutured into them anymore. Like particularly in an era of information overload. And I think it plays with those themes as well.
We crave that kind of escapism, suturing into another story world, which is sort of what he does every day, our POV character Mark, by choosing to escape his sad real life.
DINGMAN: This suturing idea is fascinating to me. I hadn’t heard that term before, and I love it. And I agree with you. That is something that I crave more than ever now is a TV experience, a movie experience that makes me feel completely entombed with this work for as long as it’s going to last.
But perhaps the brilliance of “Severance” is that it does that to you, and then the subject matter is: “Do you really want to be entombed?”
KEHRBERG: Yes! Exactly, exactly.

DINGMAN: It’s kind of forcing you to look at what you crave.
This also makes me think about another very deep human thing that I think the show is playing on — that I hadn’t thought about until you said this — is there is always this question at work of how much of myself do I bring to the job?
It is so strange that we go to work and we play this character version of ourselves. And that’s another thing that is oddly alluring about the severance idea is what if you just went and were turned into a person you don’t even know about, so you’re not responsible for how they behave?
KEHRBERG: Yeah. No, it’s such a great, sort of realization of Foucault and power, too. Which, anytime I talk about Foucault, I love to talk about the episode of “SpongeBob” where he becomes normal.
DINGMAN: Speaking of words that I don’t often hear in proximity to each other, Foucault and SpongeBob.
KEHRBERG: Foucoult talks about the power of the state and how it exerts itself on the human body. And so it’s this big treatise on sort of industrialization and the way that time inserts itself into our lives and what it does to our physical selves and our mental selves. And there’s this episode of “SpongeBob,” where he, throughout the episode, gets physically smoothed into this smooth sponge, and he goes to tell Squidward, “Look, I’m normal now.”
And he instead of going into his normal fry cook space, he goes into a cubicle every day and he’s constantly watching the clock. And it’s just this perfect, like, this is the exertion of state power on to the body. The physicality has been smoothed out, difference has been smoothed out.
DINGMAN: So I will say one of the feelings that came up for me — that felt different in 2025 than it did in 2021 and 2022 when I was watching the original season — was for me, the relationship with work element of the show has morphed into a conversation about the relationship with escapism.
One of the reasons that “Severance” stood out is because it was asking us to think at a time when television during the pandemic, for so many people, was a way of not thinking.
KEHRBERG: Oh, that’s so true. Yeah, it was all comfort nostalgia. Yeah.
DINGMAN: Now we have this thing that for many people on the left, they don’t want to think about a system that feels oppressive. And here is this show that is saying, “I think you should be thinking about it.”
KEHRBERG: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. And I think there’s a little bit of a shift in the feel of it already in season two, because it takes on, I think, even more of an existentialist tone because we have these people who’ve been fighting to get answers to their questions. But the ultimate answer to their question is essentially their own death.
If they’re no longer working there, then their severed selves cease to exist. So there is a kind of existentialist’s embrace of just pushing the rock up the hill again and again and again and embracing the moment when you get to look down and see the rock roll back down again, and finding joy in that.
DINGMAN: Well, I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler to say that. A lot of the action in the first episode of season two is centered on the question of whether or not the four primary characters will continue to work at Lumen Industries, which means, to your point, will they keep these severed versions of themselves alive?
And I think that, again, points at what is so oddly appealing and unnerving about the show is that it is a show about this odd, performative version of yourself. And then now it seems like it’s becoming a show about why you maybe kind of need that version of yourself, because it helps give you some perspective on the rest of yourself.
KEHRBERG: Yes, yes. And questioning how false that version is, ultimately. If you do the performance so often, at what point is it not performance?