Best Ever
Thriller Drama?

The elevator descends. Mark Scout’s face goes slack, and when the doors open, someone else walks out — same body, different person. This is severance: a surgical procedure that splits consciousness between work and home. Your “innie” knows only the office, remembers nothing of the outside world. Your “outie” remembers everything except the eight hours spent at Lumon Industries. It’s the most elegant sci-fi premise in years, and Dan Erickson uses it to ask questions that feel increasingly urgent: Who are you when you’re working? Is that person really you?

The Lumon offices are designed as a liminal nightmare. Endless white corridors, fluorescent lighting, no windows, no reference to time or weather. Production designer Jeremy Hindle created spaces that feel both mundane and deeply wrong — cubicles arranged in isolation, departments that serve unclear purposes, a break room where “wellness sessions” involve reciting corporate affirmations. It’s every soul-crushing office job abstracted into architecture, and the abstraction makes the critique sharper.

Adam Scott’s Mark is the audience surrogate, a widower who chose severance to escape grief for eight hours a day. But he’s also playing two characters — Outie Mark, hollowed out by loss, and Innie Mark, who experiences confusion and gradual rebellion. The performance requires Scott to modulate tiny differences: the way each version holds his body, the light in the eyes, the sense of being inhabited versus being emptied. It’s career-best work from an actor who’d been underestimated.

The ensemble operates on the same dual frequency. Britt Lower’s Helly starts as a new hire who immediately rejects the arrangement — her innie records desperate messages to her outie begging to be let out, and her outie responds by sending her back. Zach Cherry’s Dylan discovers his innie has children he’s never met and experiences a rage that fuels the season’s climax. John Turturro’s Irving falls in love with another innie, a romance that exists only in stolen moments between tasks. Christopher Walken plays that love interest with unexpected tenderness. Each character is split, and the splits generate story.

The mythology unfolds slowly, deliberately. Lumon’s founders, the Eagan family, are treated with religious reverence by management. Kier Eagan’s writings are scripture. Paintings of the founders hang in hushed galleries. The “severed floor” workers process data they don’t understand, sorting numbers that evoke emotions they can’t explain. The mystery isn’t solved by season’s end — it deepens — but the restraint feels earned. The show trusts viewers to stay curious without constant revelation.

The season one finale is a masterclass in parallel tension. The innies briefly gain control of their outies’ bodies in the outside world, experiencing life beyond Lumon for the first time while racing to expose what’s happening before the switch reverts. Director Ben Stiller crosscuts between storylines with precision, building toward cliffhangers that feel both inevitable and shocking. “She’s alive” — those two words reframe everything that came before.

The labor critique is obvious but not heavy-handed. Severance takes the alienation of work — the way jobs can feel disconnected from the rest of life, the way corporations demand loyalty while offering precarity — and makes it literal. Your company doesn’t just want your time. It wants a version of you that exists only to serve. The horror isn’t the sci-fi procedure. It’s that we recognize it.

Please try to enjoy each day equally.

Dan Erickson: The Best Ever is capitalism as body horror. Is Severance the Best Ever Workplace Horror Series? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• Season 1 is streaming on Apple TV+ with the highest-quality compression available.
• The Blu-ray release includes behind-the-scenes features on the production design.
• The vinyl soundtrack captures Theodore Shapiro’s unsettling score.