Fix Your Severance Withdrawals By Watching These 10 Mind-Bending Shows

Apple TV’s Dark Matter may come wrapped in glossier tech and fewer cubicles than Severance, but don’t be fooled—both series revel in the quiet horror of split identities and corporate puppeteering. Based on Blake Crouch’s novel, the show follows Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), a mild-mannered physicist who’s abducted into a parallel universe by a more ambitious version of himself, forcing him into a cat-and-mouse game across alternate realities. Where Severance slices the self neatly in two with surgical precision, Dark Matter takes a sledgehammer to the soul, splintering reality with every jump.

Jason doesn’t just wrestle with duality—he’s hunted by the man he could’ve been. Like Severance’s Mark S. (Adam Scott), he’s trapped between grief and a synthetic peace, except this time the office is swapped for a multiverse-hopping nightmare. Both shows deliver corporate paranoia with a side of existential dread, and both ask the same brutal question: What part of you is really you when someone else—or something else—is calling the shots?

If you think Lumon’s sterile stairwells are creepy, wait until you’ve seen two versions of J.K. Simmons stalking each other across a Berlin split not by a wall, but by dimensions. Counterpart is a brainy, noir-soaked spy thriller with just enough high-concept sci-fi to scratch the same itch as Severance. The premise? A mild-mannered UN pencil-pusher named Howard Silk (Simmons) discovers that his organization has been guarding a portal to a parallel Earth for decades—and his counterpart, a colder, deadlier version of himself, has crossed over to stop a cross-dimensional cold war from going hot.

Much like Severance, Counterpart weaponizes identity—posing unnerving questions about who we are when stripped of memory, emotion, or the comfort of a single self. And like Severance’s Mark S., Howard is both victim and investigator, forced to untangle not just a mystery, but his own fractured reflection. Throw in double-crosses, bureaucratic overlords, and a few ethically murky lab experiments, and you’ve got a show that doesn’t just echo Severance, it deepens the conversation.

Maniac is the acid trip therapy session that breaks the whole brain in half before stitching it back together with neon thread. The Netflix limited series tracks Owen (Jonah Hill), a paranoid schizophrenic heir with a tenuous grip on reality, and Annie (Emma Stone), a pill-addicted loner haunted by the death of her sister, as they’re pulled into a clinical trial promising to “fix” them. What unfolds is a kaleidoscopic plunge into shared delusions—one minute they’re noir detectives interrogating lemurs, the next they’re elf-eared fantasy warriors—all orchestrated by a malfunctioning AI therapist named GRTA (who, like Lumon’s severed employees, has her own breakdown mid-procedure).

Like Severance, Maniac explores the allure and danger of erasing pain to become more “productive.” When Owen’s mind fractures between his real self and his fantasy personas, it mirrors Innie Mark’s slow discovery that his other life might be a lie. And just like that chilling Lumon break room scene, Maniac features a moment in which the characters are forced to relive their worst memories for the sake of “treatment.” Both shows sit at the crossroads of sci-fi and psychology, where identity is a glitchy loop and the cure might just be worse than the disease.

The sterile cubicles and coded memories of Severance find a chilling parallel in the clinical corridors of Homecoming, Amazon Prime’s unnerving dive into corporate memory manipulation. Instead of office workers getting their brains split in two, you’ve got Julia Roberts playing a caseworker at a facility that helps soldiers “adjust” back to civilian life. The plot twist is that the place is secretly drugging them to erase their memories so they can be redeployed without all that pesky PTSD. It’s super subtle at first, but you start picking up on the weirdness in certain moments—like when Walter (Stephan James), one of the soldiers, realizes his memories don’t quite add up anymore.

This will unquestionably give you Severance vibes, especially given how the characters slowly start questioning the system around them. And just like Lumon in Severance, the Geist Group hides all this shady stuff behind clean visuals and corporate lingo. Homecoming doesn’t have memory-splitting elevators, but the way it messes with identity and free will? Same energy. It begs the question: How much of yourself can you lose before you stop being you? That is very much in that Severance wheelhouse.

HBO’s Westworld is like Severance’s older, more violent predecessor—the one who swapped office cubicles for saloons but still spends way too much time pondering the nature of identity. At its core, Westworld is less about cowboys and more about control: synthetic humans waking up every day with no memory, forced into loops by a corporation that literally scripts their lives. That’s basically Innie Helly (Britt Lower) all over again, just with gunfights and philosophical monologues.

When Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) finds out he’s a host and that his memories were implanted to make him more manageable, it hits the same nerve as Mark S. slowly realizing the extent of Lumon’s manipulation. Both shows ask what makes you you—is it your memories, your choices, or the illusion of freedom in a system designed to break you? Swap the maze tattooed under a host’s scalp for the Severed Floor’s labyrinth of halls, and you’re staring at two sides of the same dystopian coin.

The surreal British drama series kicks off with a British spy, known only as Number Six (Patrick McGoohan), resigning from his job and immediately getting kidnapped and dumped in a surreal seaside “village” where everyone’s polite but nothing is real. It’s kind of like Lumon’s Severed Floor with beach views—he can’t leave, he doesn’t know who’s watching him, and every cheerful smile is just another layer of the trap.

In one episode he thinks he’s finally escaped, only to realize the whole escape was staged, just another manipulation, much like when Mark in Severance thinks he’s getting answers but it turns out to be just another corporate trick. Both shows are obsessed with the idea of autonomy. In Severance, they split your mind in two; in The Prisoner, they just scramble it.

Max Headroom is like Severance if you cranked the TV static to eleven and sprinkled in some 80s corporate paranoia. The show kicks off with Edison Carter (Matt Frewer), a journalist in a dystopian future where TV networks literally kill to keep ratings up. After he uncovers something shady, he crashes his bike and ends up in a coma—so the network copies his brain and accidentally creates Max (Frewer), this glitched-out digital version of himself who starts causing chaos on-air. It’s kind of like if Lumon took Mark’s consciousness and uploaded it into a sarcastic TV personality just to see what happens. Actually, Apple might need to greenlight that show.

There’s a remarkable scene in which Edison watches Max mock the very system that created him, and it feels a lot like Innie Helly trying to protest her own existence on the Severed Floor. Both shows are obsessed with identity being co-opted by corporations—Max is literally a personality split from his original self, used for corporate gain, just like the Innies. The vibe’s different—neon-soaked and jittery instead of sterile and quiet—but the core idea remains: when a company takes control of your identity, whatever’s left is just a fragment shaped to serve their needs.

The Twilight Zone walked so Severance could spiral—it’s the OG of taking familiar experiences and shifting them ever-so-slightly to explore the dread and existential horror under the surface of everyday life. It’s an anthology series, yeah, but so many episodes tap into the unsettling experience of characters realizing their lives are being scripted by someone else. In the episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” a group of strangers wakes up in a strange cylinder with no memory, trying to make sense of where they are or who they were—basically the severed floor with circus music.

They fight to escape, only to learn they’re just toys in a donation bin, a revelation which hits with the same gut-punch as Innie Helly discovering her Outie sees her as a thing, not a person. And then there’s “The Obsolete Man,” in which a librarian is put on trial in a society that’s erased books and individuality—the same sterile dread as Severance, the same confrontation with systems erasing people’s worth. Severance might wear a sleeker suit, but it’s still circling the idea that when someone else controls your story, your identity becomes just another tool shaped to serve their design.

Like Severance, Netflix’s popular sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror lives in that sweet spot where tech meets trauma, asking what happens when the systems we build to “optimize” life end up hollowing us out. Take “White Christmas,” in which people’s consciousnesses get trapped in tiny smart home devices—basically Innie Mark, but inside a glorified Alexa, forced to make toast for an eternity. Or “USS Callister,” in which people are copied into a game and stripped of their autonomy—just like the Innies, they remember pain and crave freedom, but are locked inside a reality someone else designed.

Even “Nosedive” hits that Severance nerve, showing how curated personas can choke out real identity. Both shows are haunted by this question: when your thoughts, your choices, your self are filtered through a corporate or digital lens, what part of you is still truly yours? Severance may focus on fluorescent lights and break room therapy, but Black Mirror already warned us—what we give up for comfort, productivity, or control might be the very thing that makes us human.

Innie and Outie Mark S’s little VHS kerfuffle at the end of Severance Season 2 is child’s play compared to the mutli-season blood feud between hacker supreme Elliott Alderson (Rami Malek) and his alter ego, Mr. Robot. The award-winning USA Network drama follows Elliott and his developmentally stunted and perpetually traumatized gang of digital anarchists, known as F Society, as they try to free humanity from the shackles of evil corporation E Corp (Get it?) while also avenging the deaths of a few of their parents at the greedy hands of its senior executives. Not only does Mr. Robot feature the best performance in Malek’s sensational career; it’s also one of the only shows from the last decade to match Severance’s unique blend of psychological thriller and sci-fi. While Mr. Robot leans more into cybersecurity while Severance’s focus is on sci-fi consciousness splitting, the show does a brilliant (and at times better) job of illustrating the internal struggles between two diametrically opposed halves of the same person.

At one point, Mr. Robot shoots and almost kills Elliott, takes over his consciousness without his consent to plan a deadly attack, and uses his childhood trauma to manipulate him. That alone is enough to draw parallels between Mr. Robot and Severance. There’s also the mysterious and diabolical corporate overlords of both shows, the computer work leading to real-world consequences, and the, at times, claustrophobic cinematography that really makes these two shows cousins from the same dystopian family tree.