Severance

Severance is an American science-fiction thriller television series created by screenwriter Dan Erickson and executive produced by Ben Stiller. It premiered on the streaming service Apple TV+ (later Apple TV) on February 18, 2022. The plot follows the daily life of workers who have undergone “severance,” a first-of-its-kind proprietary medical procedure that surgically divides an employee’s consciousness to separate their work-self from their home-self.

Severance stars Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman, and Britt Lower as employees of the mysterious biotechnology company Lumon. By the end of its second season in March 2025, Severance was the most-watched show on Apple TV+, eclipsing the sitcom Ted Lasso to reach the streaming service’s top spot. Filming for season three began in late July 2026. Given the show’s long filming and production schedule, the third season is estimated to air in fall 2027.

(The content below contains spoilers for seasons one and two.)

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Premise

Because of the highly mysterious and secretive nature of its work, Lumon maintains a group of employees who have had their consciousness surgically divided, creating two distinct personas within each individual: their work persona, called their innie, and their home persona, called their outie. An individual’s innie and outie have little knowledge of each other and share no common experiences; it is as though they are two entirely different people sharing the same body. The severed employees transition between their two consciousnesses via an elevator ride to and from their workspace on Lumon’s Severed Floor, an underground level with labyrinthine corridors and rooms devoid of windows. There they toil in highly compartmentalized departments with vague objectives. The severance procedure is controversial, and an underground movement of activists, called the Whole Mind Collective, actively tries to outlaw the procedure. A former employee and doctor works on a dangerous and highly experimental reintegration process to reverse it.

Plot summary

Severance’s protagonist, Mark Scout (Adam Scott), is a former history professor who opted for the severance procedure to escape his intense grief after the sudden death of his wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman). At the start of the series, he receives a promotion to lead Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department. No one on the team knows what the data means or what their refining accomplishes. As the new department head, Mark is tasked with onboarding a newly severed employee named Helly (Britt Lower).

His curiosity piqued by his sudden promotion and the disappearance of his predecessor, innie Mark enlists the rest of the MDR team to help him learn more about Lumon by exploring the nondescript, mazelike basement compound in which they work. The MDR team struggles with their supervisors’ intense surveillance and the deprivation they feel at being denied personhood outside of the workday. Meanwhile, they must navigate the cult of personality surrounding the company’s leadership, the Eagan family, and the resulting arcane culture and practices that shroud Lumon’s pursuits in secrecy. To promote severed employees’ compliance at work, the company provides them with occasional sessions conducted by Lumon’s wellness director, Ms. Casey (Lachman), who tells the innies tantalizing facts about their outies’ lives, such as “Your outie is fond of music and owns many records.”

In the first season’s finale, the MDR team successfully orchestrates a plan to activate their work consciousness in the outside world, hoping to communicate to others the conditions of their confinement. Helly discovers that her outie is Helena Eagan, who is slated to one day run Lumon, and Mark discovers that Ms. Casey is, inexplicably, his outie’s dead wife, Gemma.

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In the show’s second season, Lumon struggles to contain the fallout from these discoveries and fires the head of the severed floor, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), replacing her with her former deputy, Seth Milchick (Tillman). Helena impersonates Helly at work in an attempt to further suppress the innie rebellion as the other innies continue their quest to uncover Lumon’s secrets and search for the now-disappeared Ms. Casey. Outside of work, Mark’s outie pursues the risky process of reintegrating his severed consciousness to find Gemma, who is severed and being held hostage by Lumon. As season two comes to a close, Mark’s outie and innie work together to rescue Gemma/Ms. Casey and come closer to understanding Lumon’s sinister mission.

Development

Creator Dan Erickson came up with the idea for the show in 2012. While working a string of monotonous office jobs, he found himself wishing that he could skip through time to the end of the workday without having to experience it. In 2016 Erickson’s Severance pilot made an annual list of best unproduced genre screenplays by BloodList—where other successes such as Bird Box (2018) and Don’t Worry Darling (2022) got their start. Erickson then sent the script to Stiller’s production company, Red Hour Productions. In 2019 Apple TV+ ordered a season of the show, starring Scott and Stiller as executive producer. Erickson told The Seattle Times in 2022 that the tone of the series was influenced by films such as The Truman Show (1998), Being John Malkovich (1999), and the Matrix trilogy, as well as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952).

Reception

Severance received extensive critical acclaim and garnered record-breaking viewership, quickly becoming Apple TV+’s most-watched show at the time. According to Metacritic, a website that aggregates reviews of movies and TV shows, 94 percent of the reviews of Severance were positive and none was negative. Rotten Tomatoes, another aggregate review site, gave Severance a 95 percent positive rating. Critics praise the show’s striking visual style, strong performances, and incisive commentary on modern office life and personal identity. In 2022 the show won two Emmy Awards for best score and for main title design. In 2025 the show won eight Emmys, including acting honors for Lower and Tillman.