Paranoia on a silver platter

Express Tribune

21-02-2025

It's been three years since Severance first burrowed into our collective consciousness, bringing with it a vision of corporate life so precise, so unsettling, that even the most mundane office corridors began to feel vaguely menacing. With its stark fluorescent lighting, labyrinthine hallways, and the eerie blankness of Lumon Industries' employees, the Apple TV+ series took the drudgery of the nine-to-five and turned it into something existentially harrowing.
With a second season airing since January 17 and the psychological thrills intensifying, the wait between episodes may send some dedicated fans to seek similarly mind-bending worlds. Few shows achieve Severance's delicate balance of psychological intrigue, corporate satire, and reality-warping mystery, but fret not for there are a few that come close. Here are five that tap into the same unease, peeling back layers of identity, control, and the ever-permeable boundary between work and self.
'Devs'
If Severance left you thinking about the godlike power of corporate overlords, Alex Garland's Devs pushes that idea further - into the world of determinism, quantum mechanics, and a tech giant that operates more like a religious cult than a company. At the centre of it is Lily Chan, a software engineer whose boyfriend mysteriously dies after being recruited into the secretive Devs program at Amaya, a Silicon Valley behemoth run by Nick Offerman in full enigmatic-guru mode.
There's a similar precision at play here: sterile, monolithic spaces, an oppressive corporate aesthetic, a creeping sense that nothing - not even free will - is safe from the grasp of the employer. But whereas Severance severs memory, Devs dismantles the very notion of choice. And like Lumon, Amaya is not just a workplace, it's an all-consuming system, one that dictates reality itself.
'Homecoming'
For those drawn to Severance's tightly wound corporate conspiracy, Homecoming delivers a similarly slick, paranoia-laced descent into institutional control. The first season, led by Julia Roberts, unfolds in two timelines: one where her character, Heidi Bergman, works at a facility designed to rehabilitate soldiers, and another where she has no memory of having ever worked there at all.
The comparisons are easy to make - both shows manipulate memory as a tool of control, stripping their characters of agency while keeping them trapped in eerily precise, almost antiseptic environments. And like Lumon's "severed" floor, the Homecoming facility is its own kind of liminal space, where reality bends just enough to be deeply unsettling. If Severance made you second-guess the fine print in your HR paperwork, Homecoming will have you side-eyeing every last bureaucratic process in your life.
'Maniac'
Corporate overreach? Check. Surrealist horror masquerading as self-improvement? Check. A meticulously designed, retro-futuristic aesthetic? Maniac has all the makings of a Severance sibling, though it swaps out workplace drudgery for pharmaceutical experimentation.
The premise: two strangers, Annie (Emma Stone) and Owen (Jonah Hill), enroll in a drug trial promising to cure all psychological ailments. What follows is a trippy, kaleidoscopic journey through simulated realities, from a Tolkien-esque fantasy land to a '70s-inflected spy thriller - all overseen by a malfunctioning AI with mommy issues.
What makes Maniac a kindred spirit to Severance isn't just its visual ambition but its emotional depth. Both shows use their outlandish premises to explore something painfully human: the desperate need to escape, to rewrite, to compartmentalise. And like Severance's Lumon, Maniac's Neberdine Pharmaceutical is an institution with motives far murkier than advertised.
'Counterpart'
If what you loved about Severance was its meticulous, bureaucratic take on identity - the idea that one version of you could exist without knowing the other - then Counterpart should be next on your list.
JK Simmons stars as Howard Silk, a mild-mannered UN employee who discovers his agency has been guarding a secret: a parallel dimension, one that diverged from our own decades ago. His double, living on the other side, is everything he isn't; hardened, confident, deeply entrenched in an espionage war between the two worlds.
The way Severance interrogates work-life balance, Counterpart interrogates fate. Both shows hinge on the idea that we are not simply who we are, but who we are allowed to be. And both make the spaces that govern those identities, be it Lumon's endless white corridors or Counterpart's shadowy government offices, feel like purgatories of their own making.
'Black Mirror'
An obvious choice? Maybe. But there's a reason Black Mirror remains the benchmark for tech-driven existential dread.
While not a single cohesive story, many of its episodes tap into Severance's key anxieties: the slippery ethics of corporate power (White Christmas), the commodification of memory (The Entire History of You), the horror of having your identity splintered into something unrecognisable (USS Callister). And like Severance, it's less about the technology itself than the way it erodes the human condition: how innovation, in the wrong hands, becomes a tool for entrapment rather than liberation.