“There's more to work than life.”
Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives. When a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs.
Latest episode: S2 E10 Cold Harbor (Mar 20, 2025)
At Lumon Industries, employees undergo "severance," a procedure dividing their work and personal memories. Mark, a grieving team leader, begins to uncover the dark secrets of the company, forcing him and his coworkers to confront questions of identity, free will, and corporate control.
Mark and his friends learn the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe.
We spend a ridiculous amount of our lives under fluorescent lights. (I once calculated the raw hours for a windowless desk job I had in my twenties and immediately regretted the math). latestnetflix.com's view is that there is an unspoken agreement in corporate America that you leave your personal baggage in the parking lot.
Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller took that quiet, depressing little social contract and stretched it to a terrifying extreme. Severance doesn't just ask what would happen if you could surgically split your consciousness between your work self and your home self. It asks why we are so desperate to do it in the first place.
The premise is brutally simple. Lumon Industries offers a procedure that divides your memories. When you ride the elevator down to the basement, your "Outie" vanishes and your "Innie" wakes up.
Your Innie knows nothing about your childhood, your family, or your sorrows. They only know the job. No context.
No escape. It is a brilliant science fiction concept, but Stiller grounds it in the mundane indignities of office life. The production design is a claustrophobic blend of mid-century modern furniture and archaic, chunky computers.
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