“Severance” Season 1 immediately made its way on TVLine’s list of best TV shows of 2022, and the series has only grown in stature since then. Even so, as groundbreaking as it is, the sci-fi mystery on Apple TV+ did not appear out of thin air. Like any successful series, “Severance” draws on decades of quality television, making its own mark while standing on the shoulders of giants.
If there’s one show that “Severance” very obviously shares DNA with, it’s “Black Mirror.” After all, the former depicts an office hell where “innie” characters, surgically stripped of their off-hours identities, toil away with little chance of ever seeing the outside world. The shadowy nature of their work and office culture only deepens the sense of detachment and dread. Though “Severance” soon expands into something not even Charlie Brooker’s unflinching anthology could hope to capture within the span of a single episode, the premise nevertheless seems like a spiritual sibling to some of the more brightly-lit and tech-heavy “Black Mirror” episodes.
In fact, “Severance” creator Dan Ericksen openly admits that his show was influenced by “Black Mirror” — specifically the show’s 2014 Christmas special, “White Christmas.” The episode, starring Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall as two men stuck living in a remote cabin, explores the terrifying implications of technology that can create digital copies of people. It made Ericksen contemplate the terrifying existence of these copies, which are locked in an inescapable life determined by their makers and could be punished by altering the way they experience time. “I remember feeling so cold and afraid after seeing that, this devastating idea of having to experience this endless solitude,” Ericksen told The New York Times in 2022.
Apart from White Christmas, Severance has a whole host of influences
The trapped digital clones in “White Christmas” resemble the severed floor and “innie” characters on “Severance,” with Ericksen specifically pointing to Helly R. (Britt Lower) and her failed escape attempt in Season 1. “It’s this nightmare of running out a door, and then you’re just running back in, and you realize you’re truly stuck in this liminal space with this kind of nightmare logic,” he said in The New York Times interview.
“Black Mirror,” of course, isn’t the only thing “Severance” is clearly influenced by. Many shows influenced by Brooker’s series can ultimately trace their roots back to Rod Serling’s legendary “The Twilight Zone.” Happy to wear this particular influence on its sleeve, “Severance” has actually directly referenced Serling’s anthology series. “Severance” Season 2, Episode 9 (“The After Hours”) shares its name and certain thematic similarities with a “Twilight Zone” Season 1 Episode about a living mannequin. The episode even mentions the classic 1960 episode’s main character, Marsha White (Anne Francis), and its key concepts like “9th Floor,” “gold thimble,” and the “specialties department.”
Some of the other influential works Ericksen mentions are “Being John Malkovich,” the surreal 1999 debut from writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, and Terry Gilliam’s dystopian “Brazil” (1985). According to Ericksen, the former inspired the severed floor’s skewed layout, while the latter left its mark on the way Lumon exerts total disorienting control over the innies.
Severance benefits from long-term planning
Another show that inspired the makers of “Severance” is “Lost,” ABC’s sci-fi mystery drama that also thrived on outlandish plot twists and a slowly unfolding mystery box nature. Ericksen noted in a 2022 interview with The Guardian that “Lost” sometimes served as an example of what “Severance” should avoid. As an example, he cited the “Hurley bird,” a massive falcon-like avian that inexplicably speaks Hugo “Hurley” Reyes’ (Jorge Garcia) name in “Live Together, Die Alone,” the “Lost” Season 2 finale. “Then it’s never referenced again, the whole show,” Ericksen said. “They probably thought they could find something to do with it later — we are trying to avoid that.”
Later, though, Ericksen did clarify that he understands that the best and worst moments of “Lost” come from a very different place than “Severance,” which is far more compact and enjoys the ability to make more elaborate plans for its future. “I understand the challenges that [‘Lost’] faced,” Ericksen said in a later 2025 interview with The Guardian. “They were learning how to do it as they went, with many, many more episodes a season than we have. But for me, it’s really about planning it in advance. If we set the rules of the world, and we know what the company’s intentions are, and we know what the end game is, that frees us up to play. We can have these funny, strange little diversions, but we know we’re not going to go so far off track that we can’t come back.”
“Severance” is available for streaming on Apple TV+. “Black Mirror” is available for streaming on Netflix.
This story originally appeared on TVLine
