How Severance Employs the Uncanny Valley

There’s something uncanny about the office.

It has furniture and lights and doors, but nothing you would ever put in your own house. You eat in a little room they tell you to, wear drab office clothes and make cordial office friends. It’s you, but it’s not your life. It just kind of feels that way sometimes. A drop-shipped dupe of the designer handbag that is the human experience.

Severance is a show that explores the outer limits of this artificiality. It’s a paranoid Philip K. Dick mind-melter in a prestige TV package, exploring the unsettling otherness of an office setting that’s just slightly outside the bounds of reality.

Many of us have little choice but to spend much of our short time on earth existing in an office, which means we’re about as familiar with the look and feel of the space as we are with our own faces. When things are even just a little, tiny bit off, we notice. That’s the theory behind the “uncanny valley,” the idea that the closer humanoid robots look to real people, the more that subtle, slightly-askew differences will make them exponentially more freaky.

If a robot is a cartoony abstraction like Bender Rodriguez, people are totally fine with it. But if you deck him out in some fake skin over a highly articulated endoskeleton, our monkey-brain “flight” responses can’t help but kick in. It’s how our brains evolved to perceive things, possibly to prevent us mingling with other early hominids.

Think Disney’s Hall of Presidents, or all those android girlfriends on display at CES. The more something resembles the real thing, the more that small, almost imperceivable differences matter. Achieving perfection is essentially the only antidote to this phenomenon.

The uncanny valley is what makes the CG animation of Bob Zemeckis movies so skin-crawling. It’s why we cringed through Mass Effect: Andromeda. The reason AI generated babies raise instinctual alarm bells. When something is not quite right, it can feel very wrong.

In Severance, Lumon Headquarters is located in a fake town called Kier in a fake state called PE situated deep within the uncanny valley. The facility features sprawling, identical hallways of impeccably sterile decor. Dozens of meticulously labelled doors that can lead anywhere from a cookie-cutter conference room to a deranged faction of goat-keepers.

Lumon isn’t the workplace we know, it’s the one we visit in our nightmares, the mundane ones where you completely forgot about a project you were supposed to be working on for months and it’s due right now. It’s a dreamlike space of fuzzy details and a barely-audible buzzing of dread.

Severance is heavily informed by the aesthetic of “liminal spaces,” impossibly vast, eerily familiar environments designed to instill a sense of dread and confusion. Imagine a dead mall that sprawls on for infinity, or a surreal fast food playplace with slides that don’t end and ball pits that are deeper than the diameter of the planet.

Liminal spaces came to prominence thanks to the spread of the Backrooms, a creepypasta that first appeared on 4chan back in 2019. “In the Backrooms,” wrote the surprisingly eloquent poster who will forever remain anon, there’s “nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”

The Backrooms is a true internet original,a memetic masterpiece that belongs to no one and every one. It spawned a series of short films, countless streamer-bait jump scare games on Steam, and, soon, a major motion picture from A24. Severance creator Dan Erickson cited The Backrooms, as well as its video game predecessor The Stanley Parable, as one of many inspirations for the show’s dreamlike unreality.

He also named The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Dark City, films featuring characters who realize they are trapped in an obscene simulacrum of life, manipulated by powerful forces beyond their control or understanding. Even before our naive heroes learn the truth, they begin their journey by seeing the slight cracks in the seemingly perfect facades around them– enlightenment achieved by way of the uncanny valley effect.

The notion of awakening from a constructed reality runs deep within Severance, not only thematically but aesthetically. The Truman Show, in particular, with its deliberately anachronistic clockwork world, seems to inform the show's interpretation of the timeless essence of the office.

Lumon’s design language isn't a pastiche of any particular era, though the earth tone interiors and Brutalist tech evoke the ugly interiors of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The severed floor exists outside of any specific time or place the same way its employees exist outside of their real lives. It’s a boiled-down, hyperreal, evocative impression of what a workplace is. It’s not the office, it’s Officecore.

There’s been copious discussion about how Season 2 of Severance doesn’t quite live up to the high bar set by its predecessor. Some attribute that to unsatisfying follow-ups to the first season’s revelations. Others might point to a ramping up of the mystery box-ification that has plagued buzzworthy TV shows since Lost.

For myself, I’ve found the show slightly less interesting since it shifted its focus away from the workplace. Outdoor team-building exercises, diversions to hellish hometowns, and an increased emphasis on the outside world has diminished what made the show so special in the first place: the unsettling excursion into the uncanny valley of our artificial office lives.