Spoilers ahead;
There are few shows that don’t just stick with you, but rewire the way you look at the world. Apple TV’s Severance did that to me. It cracked open my head, wove itself into my thoughts, and refused to leave, not because it’s outlandish, but because it’s hauntingly familiar.
Visually, it’s a masterpiece. The palette of icy blues, sterile whites, and muted monotones is a quiet scream, a perfect visual metaphor for corporate numbness. Every frame is clinical, but beneath that order is an emotional chaos that seeps through in silences, hallway walks, and close-ups that linger a bit too long. It’s not just a show. It’s a visual thesis on alienation.
The central theme, severing your consciousness into ‘innie’ and ‘outie’ personas, sounds like science fiction, but tell me that’s not already how many of us function. That feeling of dissociation at work, the performative identity during office hours, the emotional vacuum that exists between 10am and 6pm? It’s eerily real. Severance doesn’t feel far-fetched. It feels prophetic in a way.
Adam Scott as Mark.
I work from home, and yet there are days when I genuinely forget I have a life beyond my laptop. My room becomes the office, my body a machine. Family, meals, even the sound of my own voice fade into the background. From 10am to 6pm all I can think about is finishing the next task, joining the next call, meeting the next deadline. Everything else be it emotion, identity or a sense of presence, it just shuts off. How is that any different from Severance? The only real difference is that I never leave the building, and the exhaustion never really ends.
I also couldn’t help but draw a direct line to India’s own corporate giants, the ones that own our infrastructure, our data, our news channels, and sometimes, even our silence. The kind of companies that promise purpose but demand obedience, and where your ‘outie’ is trained to look away while your ‘innie’ does the dirty work. Severance may be fiction, but exploitation masked as innovation is not.
The genius of Severance lies in its emotional arcs. The idea that love could transcend severance, that connection, even in sterilized environments, still finds a way to pulse was perhaps the most hopeful undercurrent in an otherwise bleak narrative. Dylan’s fierce fatherhood moment, Irvin and Burt’s tender connection, Helly’s quiet rebellion, these were sparks in a grey abyss.
Mark (Adam Scott) and Helly (Britt Lower) from a still on Severance.
Adam Scott’s performance deserves every accolade. His Mark is not just a man grieving, he’s a man trying to forget grief and failing. The slow reveal that the very data he’s been ‘refining’ is actually his wife’s emotional temperaments? Chilling. Was Mark chosen for this task because he once knew her intimately? That’s not just dystopia, that’s cruelty disguised as efficiency.
And then there’s Gemma. Her infertility journey taps into a wider theme: how women’s pain is often medicalized, exploited, and repackaged as progress. Mrs. Harmony Cobel’s psychological unraveling, her obsession, her cold maternalism, it’s all a reflection of the systems that blur care and control until they’re indistinguishable.
I also loved Mr. Milchick and Dylan, their dance of power and resistance. Milchick, the perfect company man, holding the line with a smile, and Dylan, the innie who becomes a father for a moment and refuses to forget. Their dynamic was so layered, it almost begged for a spinoff. And let’s not forget Irvin and Burt. Their love story, quiet and coded, was one of the most honest queer portrayals I’ve seen. Tender, mature, and so tragically vulnerable.
Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) from a still on Severance.
But what hit hardest was the show’s treatment of labor and identity. The ‘innie’ is born into servitude with no past, no agency, no after. It’s a grim echo of so many Indian workers today: underpaid, surveilled, disposable. There are tech parks and factories right now where the body clocks in, but the soul stays at home. Severance just turned that reality into horror and made it art.
In India, where hustle culture is normalised, where silence is rewarded, and where power often wears a smiling mask, Severance is not just a warning. It’s a mirror.
And maybe that’s why it shook me. Because it didn’t show me a world I couldn’t imagine. It showed me the one we’re already in, just from the inside.