‘Severance’: Our writer probes a way-out series about work with meaning

Episode transcript

Clay Collins: Unless you’ve been riding up and down in an elevator with no cell service, you probably have read about, seen, sampled, or been transfixed by “Severance,” the mind-bending Apple TV+ series and Ben Stiller brainchild that left viewers hanging for three years between Seasons One and Two. Season Two wraps on March 21st, no doubt in a flurry of watch parties and Reddit threads. It’s that kind of fandom.

The show explores a kind of ultimate enforced work life balance: At home, you’re an “outie,” living a life. On the job for the sinister Lumon Industries, you’re an “innie,” doing work that is “mysterious and important,” though over characters’ shoulders it mostly looks like an early Atari game. Work is done in Spartan spaces under portraits depicting an omniscient overlord and founding ancestor called Kier.

[MUSIC]

Collins:  This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Writer Stephen Humphies covers culture for the Monitor, and he recently wrote about the show. He joins me today. Hey, Stephen, welcome back.

Humphries: Thanks so much, Clay.

Collins:  I do want to ask you without getting too granular or graphic to describe what [the act of] “severance” is in this very cool series. But first, are we “innies” right now in this windowless basement studio, or are we “outies” who just came down to record? And how do we know?

Humphries: This is one of those work weeks where I’m not sure what day it is. So I think I’m probably, this is my “innie” talking.

Collins:  Oh, you’re an innie. So tell us, um, about [the concept of] “severance,” what that is in the context of this show.

Humphries: OK, so if you’ve never seen “Severance,” I describe it as the TV series “Black Mirror” meets “The Office,” but with a lot less humor. But the tone is a lot closer to those great 1970s conspiracy theories like, uh, Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” and “The Parallax View.” [I]t also has a very distinct streak of David Lynch-style surrealism.

But let me tell listeners a little bit more about the show. The characters in the show, the workers, have undergone a surgical procedure that partitions their memories. And so once they step off the elevator into the office, they have zero recollection of their life in the outside world, you know: who they are outside of work, who their families are, where they live. And these are the “innies.” And their experience of life is that all they know is work, you know, they get into the elevator at the end of the day to leave. And the next thing they’re cognizant of is that they’re stepping off the elevator to start work all over again.

Collins: Well, we’ve all had days like that, right?

Humphries: [Laughs.] Yeah. And by contrast, when they leave work – the “outies” – they can’t recall anything about the office, you know: what kind of work they do, who their co-workers are. And those are the “outies.” And maybe that’s for the best, because in “Severance,” if they knew what kind of work they did, it’s a little bit weird. I mean, they have weird workplace-bonding exercises like bobbing for pineapples in a bucket full of water. And I think one of the reasons that the show resonated with me and so many viewers is that we’ve all felt like the “innie,” and we’ve all experienced the “outie.” Although I should hasten to exercise that at The Christian Science Monitor newsroom, we don’t go bobbing for pineapples.

Collins: Very good footnote. As you analyze this show, Stephen, you call out that it’s really about purpose. People want purpose. And at Lumon, the work, as you say, is stultifying, even though it’s accepted as just kind of how things are. And that sort of reflects something your story describes as “bore out,” which is the new burnout. And that’s a real life generational malaise, right?

Humphries: Yeah, I came across a British study published in January 2025 that found that Gen Z [members] want employers who have a positive impact. And there has been a lot written about how Gen Z is experiencing “bore out,” which is that they feel as if they aren’t being fully utilized. And they’re doing work that feels like drudgery, very much akin to the characters on the show, who, all they do is stare at their computer screens, and they move numbers into folders. It leads to a similar kind of impact as burnout.

And the study that I referenced found that when choosing work, 18-to-27-year-olds, they’re looking for jobs that offer more than just pay. They placed a high importance on the company’s impact on its local community. They wanted to choose employment based on the company’s green credentials, honesty, social responsibility. And, that gets to one of these questions about what makes work meaningful. I think that’s one of the things that “Severance” is all about, and was actually the core inspiration for the premise of the show.

Collins: Right. By that you mean series creator Dan Erickson got the idea while working at a door factory. And I don’t want to malign manufacturing jobs, because those are really important to the economy. But good work is meaningful. It connects lives. In spite of, or because of the drudgery, there’s all kinds of character unification on the show, isn’t there? And that’s kind of where it gets real.

Humphries: Indeed. So, Dan Erickson arrives in Los Angeles, and before he’s a TV writer, he’s working in this door factory. In fact, there’s a reference in “Severance,” there’s a joke about that past life in which one of the characters goes to interview at a door factory. Dan Erickson finds himself sitting in an office without windows. He’s cataloging things like door hinges. And he’s thinking to himself: “I wish I could just fast forward to the end of the day and skip this work.”

And, you know, I’ve had that experience. I had that experience actually just about every time I sit down to write an article. I’m very skillful at it, but I find it to be a very difficult, painful experience. And it’s something that I’ve often compared to doing a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, except that you’re also having to make the individual jigsaw pieces and then figure out how to put them all together. I’m on deadline, and I start thinking about this very famous Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. The young boy, Calvin, is struggling with a written homework assignment and he goes into his time travel machine – what he imagines to be a time travel machine, which is a cardboard box – and he tells his imaginary friend Hobbes: “I’m going to jump ahead to my bedtime and pick up my completed homework assignment from the future. And then we’ll return to the present and goof off for the rest of the evening.” I often wish I could do that.

And it forces us to examine that question: When work is stressful and challenging, what’s the payoff? What makes work meaningful? Because we have to find that, I think, to make the difficult parts more bearable. And that was really the inspiration for my article.

Collins: I’ve talked to other writers who really like to have written more than they like the act of writing, but of course it varies.

The best surreal culture stories often have this ant-farm quality. They’re like built worlds. I remember writing for you, almost 20 years ago now in the old weekend section, a story about [the interactive role-playing game] Second Life, an immersive story. And that was an online “sim” world of alter egos and strange interactions. Can you talk a little about this show’s aesthetic? There are the bright-white interior workspaces. Most of what happens up on the surface is normal, except for those dated automobiles that keep a viewer disoriented, temporally. It contributes a lot to the fascination, doesn’t it?

Humphries: It does. It very much feels like it’s a show set in the 1980s, even though there are cell phones. And they even use old plot printers in the show, for example. It gets back to that era when we did very much have a 9-to-5 office existence, and that’s obviously very much broken down in our modern era, where there’s more of a hybrid work.

Collins: “Multimodal” is the new term!

Humphries: [Laughs.] Which means you take your work home with you. It’s, it’s there with you on your cell phone, you can’t ever fully escape it. And we have these problems of work-life balance. And then that’s something else the show is all about. You know, unlike the characters in the show. It’s difficult sometimes to fully unplug. One of the people I interviewed, Jim Salvucci, who’s a business consultant, said something to me that really struck me. He said: “Your mind travels with you.” And it’s very tempting to think: “I’ll be happy once I get home and leave work. Or I’ll be happy when I leave my problems at home and get to work.” But it really forces us to be present. We have to find happiness and satisfaction where we’re at. You know, as Jim put it: “I think it’s a great lesson for us that it isn’t about a work life balance. It’s not yin and yang. It’s just life. And what we need to do is find a purpose in our life, and find a purpose in our work.”

Collins:  That’s great, Stephen.  One of your sources, someone who teaches leadership skills, identifies something that a main character – called Mark Scout and played by the great Adam Scott of Parks and Recreation fame – says. Your source told you: “Mark says something like: ‘We’re people, not parts of people.’ But when we, in our minds, sever our work from the rest of our life, that’s what we’re functionally doing.” That’s a great quote. It made me wonder: How do you go at sourcing for this story?

Humphries: Clay, I wanted to find people who study what makes work meaningful. And there’s actually a fair number of people who do that. So for example, there are academics. I interviewed Evgenia Lysova at the Free University in Amsterdam, who wrote an article in 2023 for the Harvard Business Review on what makes work meaningful. And there are also consultants who go into workplaces to try and improve morale and fix companies where workers are unhappy and they’re not performing to their full potential. One of the things that I often do when I research a topic is I’ll go into Amazon and look at who’s written books on these things. So I came across a new book by Wes Adams and Tamara Miles, who are consultants, called “Meaningful Work.” And I also interviewed Jim Salvucci, who’s a business leadership consultant, and he also has a book coming out on leadership titled “Greater Than Great.”

And, what was great was that they had all seen “Severance.” So we had a lot of fun talking about our conspiracy theories about what the show is all about as well. Although we didn’t quite ever figure out what the obsession with watermelons and fruit is. You know, it’s one of the things that the company gives out as rewards for performance.

Collins: Carved in the shape of a head in one case, which was a really disturbing scene.

Work happiness, life happiness. These are clearly major American cultural themes. Um, we’re kind of going through this loneliness crisis still. And I wonder, is part of the antidote learning to be whole people for whom meaning blurs around all sorts of old lines, like when you’re working, when you’re not working.

Humphries: You know, we’re not drones, and I think part of what makes work meaningful is feeling like a valued part of a community within a workspace. It’s feeling like your bosses and your colleagues care about who you are as a person and who you are outside of the office. Uh, because it’s very dehumanizing if all your manager cares about is showing up at your work cubicle, coffee mug in hand, to ask you whether or not you’ve completed “your TPS reports.” And, if you’ve seen the classic workspace comedy “Office Space,” you’ll get that reference. Um, you know, none of us wants to wind up alone at a workspace in a basement with a red stapler on our desk. Again, see “Office Space.”

Collins: [Laughs.] “I understood there’d be cake.”

Humphries: In “Severance,” you know, the four main “innie” coworkers have each other for companionship, and they have a very tight knit bond. Whereas their, uh, supervisors, Ms. Cobel, Mr. Milchik, and Ms. Huang treat the workers like infants. And Ms. Huang even says to Mr. Milchik: “Careful, we don’t want them to feel like humans.” But here’s another: The authors of this book, “Meaningful Work,” said what makes work meaningful is feeling like we’re making a difference to the world, or at least a small slice of it. Characters in “Severance” don’t have that. They don’t actually understand what their work is or even what the company does.

Collins: Not yet, anyway. The season finale is almost upon us! Thank you, Stephen, for your exploration of this story, of culture in general. And I hope we remember this conversation when we get up the elevator at the end of the day. Enjoy the season finale!

Humphries: Thanks, I’m looking forward to it.

Collins: And thanks to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes with a link to the story we discussed in this podcast, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Mackenzie Farkus is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Jeff Turton and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2025.