Negotiating 'Severance'

If you’ve watched Severance, it probably won’t come as a surprise that the show’s creator is deeply familiar with the experience of losing your job.

Feb 21, 2025

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We’ve got a special issue of Laid Off today – a pop culture dispatch from journalist and critic Jake Kleinman. He was laid off from his role of Executive Editor at Inverse on November 8, 2024, and shares an essay on what it’s like writing about the Apple TV+ series centered around identity and work right after unceremoniously losing your own job.

On the day that I lost my job, I sent three emails. The first was to my boss, who’d timed an apologetic message to hit my inbox just moments after his boss delivered the bad news to me over Zoom (I probably should have shown a bit more grace in my off-the-cuff response). The second went out to a long list of professional contacts, letting them know how to get in touch and offering to meet for a coffee (or something stronger) in the coming weeks. And the third email went to the PR team working on Severance for Apple TV+.

Until last November, I’d worked for almost seven years at Inverse, an online magazine that covers movies, TV, gaming, science, and technology (although after the last few rounds of layoffs, science and tech have mostly fallen by the wayside). And in the weeks before a surprise HR invite popped up on my calendar one morning — giving me two hours to back up my work and send my friends a panicked group text — I had been emailing back and forth with Apple about the second season of Severance.

Now that I was no longer employed by Inverse, one of my top priorities was making sure I could still write that article. (I succeeded, and you can read it here.) So I emailed Apple, explaining my situation and begging them to bear with me as I figured out a solution.

Losing your job always feels weird. You miss the routine. You miss the stability of a steady paycheck. You might even miss your coworkers. Plus, there are only so many hours you can spend each day submitting job applications and doomscrolling on LinkedIn. But the fact that I was simultaneously negotiating for more severance payments from my former employer and negotiating for more interview time with the creator of Severance compounded that weirdness. (I only won one of those negotiations.) Each new email from Apple with the subject line “Severance” felt like a tiny reminder that I’d lost not just my job, but a part of my identity.

In the following weeks, as I watched the first six episodes of Severance’s second season (one of the all-time greatest perks of being an entertainment journalist is getting to see new stuff ahead of time) and prepared for my interview with the show’s creator, Dan Erickson, I started to notice something about Apple’s twisty sci-fi show that I hadn’t noticed before. Buried underneath Severance’s many mysteries is a brutal portrayal of what it’s like to work a white-collar job in modern America — and what it feels like to lose that job.

There are some minor Severance spoilers ahead. If you’re not caught up on the show you may want to watch the latest episode before reading any further.

From the very first episode, Severance has been a clever satire of the office experience. The show stars a group of employees at a faceless biotech company who have all agreed to be “severed,” a procedure where a computer chip implanted inside the brain splits their consciousness in two so their work persona (called an “innie”) has no memory of their outie’s home life, and vice versa. The innies’ lives are defined entirely by work. When one employee named Burt (a supporting character played by Christopher Walken) is forced to retire in Season 1, his colleagues throw him a goodbye party that feels a lot like a funeral. In Season 2, after one of the main characters Irving (John Turturro) is fired during a team-building retreat gone sideways, his coworkers commemorate him with an actual funeral, complete with somber eulogies and a sculpture of his head carved out of watermelon.

Season 2 of Severance also explores another aspect of the layoff experience: just how disorienting it can feel. After the Season 1 finale, in which the innies stage a small revolution, the company responds by firing them. For the outies, this news is delivered with zero explanation. A man they’ve never met simply shows up at their homes one night, tells them they’ve been terminated, and walks away. If you’ve ever been laid off over Zoom by an HR worker you barely know for vague reasons blamed on the economy, these scenes may feel eerily familiar.

Later, when the company is forced to rehire those employees, all it takes is a meager offer and a plate of pineapple to win them back. Our employers know they have all the power, and they think we should be grateful to get a few slices of fruit. After all, how many managers will tell you that the fix for company morale is a pizza party and branded merch, not raises or actual workplace improvements?

If you’ve watched Severance, it probably won’t come as a surprise that the show’s creator is deeply familiar with the experience of losing your job.

“I am infinitely fireable,” Dan Erickson tells me when we finally sit down for our interview, “and it's such a blow when you get fired from a job that you thought you were too good for, which has happened to me many times.”

Layoffs come for us all, and when they do, Erickson understands that the emotional response to losing your job can feel far worse than the reality.

“If you have tied a lot of your identity to a job and then you are suddenly cast out of that, you're like, now all of those skills and all of that work I did doesn't apply anymore,” he says. “It does feel like a piece of you goes away.”

Erickson continues: “But then, on the outside, we also have characters who are fired and they truly have no idea what happened. I think that's also true to how it feels. I know many people who have been laid off recently. Often, they will put in years and they don't get so much as an explanation. It's just, ‘Well, today's your last day.’”

My own last day came as a shock. Even three months later, I still don’t really understand exactly what happened. And I doubt I ever will. All I know is this: I miss my innie. And I hope that one day soon, I’ll find a place that wants to give him a home — even if that job offer doesn’t come with a plate of pineapple.