Apple TV’s Severance turns office life into purgatory

True work-life balance can be as hard to achieve as inbox zero. It’s so challenging, in fact, that the characters in Severance go to a particular extreme to reach it: brain surgery. The show, which is streaming on Apple TV Plus, takes its name from a surgical procedure in which someone’s brain is essentially severed in two, creating two distinct persons: one for work, one for home life. The result is a show that feels a bit like a cross between Black Mirror and The IT Crowd, exploring the horrors of capitalism and technology with a banal kind of cheer.

Apple TV+ Watch Guide | Severance

At the center of the story is a company called Lumon Industries, an Amazon-style megacorporation that dabbles in a little of everything. (“What don’t they make,” one character asks early on.) This means there are lots of sensitive documents to sort through. In lieu of an NDA for those tasked with sorting, the company uses a procedure called severing, in which access to someone’s memories becomes “spatially dictated.” Basically, your memories are tied explicitly to a place. What happens in the records department at Lumon headquarters stays there.

It may sound like a novel way of separating your life, with work troubles staying at work, so you can focus on the rest. In practice, the procedure creates two minds in the same body: one living a normal life, the other trapped in a hellish existence where they can never leave the office. And the two are never able to interact.

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