The work is important and mysterious. The hit Apple TV show Severance resonates so deeply because it literalizes what millions already experience: the splitting of self required by modern work culture. Its fictional brain procedure makes hyper visible the dissociation we've normalized as "professionalism"—that daily transformation where we suppress... See more

Severance is interested in a lot of Big Ideas®, chief among them the impact of trauma on an individual. One very loose definition of trauma is feeling a sustained lack of control in a stressful or distressing situation, and the Innies certainly meet that requirement. A Kier maxim that’s often shown in print or spoken aloud on the show is “We must... See more

When we’re attentive to these series, to their form, their narrative structure, their genre, their history, their cultural context, the dynamics of their production, they reveal themselves to us. (This is, of course, what television studies, as an academic discipline, has always done.) It means we can see concretely what’s unique about a given... See more