Severance

“Severance,” the hit psychological corporate horror series, is a shimmering jewel of late-capitalist despair, peeling back the layers of modernity’s banal evils while cloaking them in a dystopian chic that feels like the aestheticization of HR policies themselves.

To begin with, the death and not death of Miss Casey is the series’ emotional and thematic crux, a shattering meditation on the ultimate severance: the division between life and death. Miss Casey, revealed as the “not-dead” wife of Mark, exists as a ghost of corporate design—reanimated, yet hollow, her entire being reduced to a function within Lumon Industries. It’s a grotesque violation, and one that feels eerily plausible in a world increasingly comfortable with outsourcing not just labor, but meaning, intimacy, and memory. Her robotic grace and eerie, almost maternal detachment speak to the corporate infantilization of the workplace: everyone a child, coddled yet surveilled, stripped of autonomy for the sake of “team synergy.”

Mark’s use of the severance procedure to cope with grief is as tragic as it is terrifying. The choice to sever himself from the pain of losing his wife mirrors a society hellbent on avoiding discomfort at all costs—therapy repackaged as self-surgical lobotomy. It’s cowardice disguised as self-care, and yet, it’s also devastatingly human. Mark’s grief leaks through the cracks despite Lumon’s attempts to suppress it: the “innies” and “outies” of his severed self caught in an existential tug-of-war, fumbling to reconcile what they are and what they lack. It’s a commentary on modern coping mechanisms—therapy, apps, pills—taken to their logical extreme, where the true self is not healed but anesthetized, silenced, or worse, erased.

The childishness of the inn is both claustrophobic and unsettlingly whimsical. The pastel playroom vibe—rewards of finger traps, melon balls, and waffle parties—is infantilization masquerading as motivation, the kind of grotesque infantilization that only HR could dream up. Lumon’s workspaces evoke a Fisher-Price rendition of corporate life: sanitized, safe, and disturbingly insular, a padded cell for the soul. The innies are workers as children, stripped of adult agency yet expected to perform adult labor. It’s an uncanny mirror to modern workplaces where foosball tables and free snacks are meant to paper over crushing hours, stagnating wages, and corporate surveillance.

HR, of course, looms large as the true villain—not as people, but as an entity, as policy. The “scary HR procedures” in Lumon’s labyrinthine halls evoke the most Orwellian interpretations of corporate culture, where every misstep becomes fodder for correction, punishment, or “reintegration.” Ms. Cobel, with her icy demeanor and sinister maternalism, feels like the HR manager from hell, a hybrid of Nurse Ratched and Dolores Umbridge, enforcing loyalty through gaslighting and coercion. The banality of her evil is what cuts deepest—she’s just “doing her job,” a phrase that echoes throughout history’s darkest atrocities.

And isn’t that the core of “Severance”? The banality of evil dressed in the sterile efficiency of corporate jargon, where atrocities aren’t carried out by men in uniforms but by women in pantsuits with friendly LinkedIn bios. The bland aesthetic of Lumon—white walls, fluorescent lights, cryptic slogans—belies the deep, existential horror of a system so large and impersonal that no single individual could dismantle it. It’s a system that thrives not on overt malice but on the quiet complicity of its participants. Everyone is just following procedure.

“Severance” is a rare show that captures the horror of contemporary existence with a scalpel-like precision. It’s not dystopian—it’s a reflection of the world we already live in, where grief is medicated, workplaces infantilize, and morality is outsourced to HR. It’s a Fahrenheit 451 for the era of Slack notifications and “wellness” programs—a stunningly banal nightmare.

So light a cigarette, pour yourself a stiff drink, and dive into “Severance”—but be warned, you might see more of yourself in it than you’d like.