The Severance season two finale is this week, making this both a thrilling and devastating moment for its devoted fans. Finally, some answers (maybe?) about all those lingering mysteries! But also, the end of our weekly supply of Lumon-induced drama, romance, freakiness, and quirky comedy, until such time as a yet-to-be-confirmed third season arrives! To help your tempers recalibrate when Severance wraps up, here are eight TV shows and movies that might help fill the yawning void it will leave behind.
Dark Matter
You don’t even have to exit the Apple TV+ app for Dark Matter. It’s based on Blake Crouch’s book about a man who unwittingly dives into the ultimate “what if?” scenario when he’s kidnapped by a different version of himself, then forced into an unfamiliar version of his life’s timeline. Like Severance, it explores themes of how wildly divergent personalities can evolve from a single person—and involves weird tech that seems like a pretty cool invention until the horrible consequences start making themselves known. Joel Edgerton is less endearing of a hero than Severance‘s Adam Scott, but you’ll still want to root for him to reunite with his beloved, played by Jennifer Connelly. The first season is available for streaming now; a second season is on the way.
Devs
Do you long for more workplace weirdness after all those Lumon elevator rides? Devs, created, written, and directed by Alex Garland (who’s best-known for his big-screen credits: Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War, the upcoming 28 Years Later) takes place at a mysterious tech company with sci-fi leanings (much like Severance) and involves a murder mystery (also much like Severance). It also has the Severance-like quality of boasting a killer cast, including Nick Offerman, Sonoya Mizuno, Cailee Spaeny, Alison Pill, and others. You can watch its eight-episode single season on Hulu.
Black Mirror
Quite obviously, Black Mirror and Severance have some thematic echoes, chief among them that tech can be scary—especially if its inventor or wielder has cult-like aspirations and/or fancies themselves to be a god. Just as Severance season two began to wrap up, Netflix announced the star-studded seventh season of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian standard-bearer will drop April 10. You can also stream the previous six Black Mirror seasons in case you want to experience something bleaker than our current reality in the meantime.
Westworld
At this point, it’s less and less likely we’ll ever get that fifth season Westworld‘s creators have teased in the past. But really, the four seasons we did get remain some of sci-fi television’s finest hours, exploring a world where robots are so lifelike their AI slips into the realm of the fully sentient—with the added bonus of imaginative settings (a Wild West playground for rich people, a futuristic city where humans have fallen under robot control) and an incredible cast, including Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright, and Thandiwe Newton. The only thing we can fault Westworld for isn’t the doing of the show itself; HBO yanked it from streaming a few years back, so you’ll have to fork out extra dollars to rent or buy it on streaming (Prime Video has it), or purchase the complete series on Blu-ray, DVD, or 4K UHD.
Fingernails
Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White, Luke Wilson, and Riz Ahmed star in this offbeat sci-fi romance—made for Apple TV+—set in a world where technology has supposedly cracked the formula of true love. Adding to the Severance factor, it’s actually set within the awkward confines of the Love Institute, the company that administers the test. When Buckley’s character takes a job there, she soon begins to question her own relationship, as well as whether or not the Love Institute is actually helping or hurting people.
Coherence
A group of friends and frenemies gather for a dinner party the night a comet just happens to be passing through the night sky—and reality jumbles as a result, with versions of the guests wandering in from different parallel realities. It’s a gripping sci-fi thriller that proves you don’t need a big budget or even more than one set, really, to tell an entertainingly original story, and it’s also perfect viewing for anyone who found themselves second-guessing Severance‘s Helena/Helly R. twist. Coherence is widely available on streaming, including Peacock and Prime Video.
The One I Love
Doppelgangers—the classic physically separate kind, unlike Severance‘s one body/multiple minds variety—complicate this tale of a couple (Mark Duplass, Elisabeth Moss) whose attempt to mend their relationship with a romantic getaway takes a very surreal twist. Ted Danson, who makes everything better, plays their therapist. Streaming free with ads on Prime Video.
Bliss
Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek star in this Prime Video feature from Mike Cahill (Another Earth, I Origins) that puts a romantic spin on a classic sci-fi plot: what if everything you think is real is just a simulation? Bliss also offers a thoughtful exploration of what it means to appreciate what you have in life—while also learning to accept the grimier stuff you’d rather just delete with the ease of a keystroke. Streaming on Prime Video.
Honorable mention: Made for Love
This sci-fi series that ran on what was then HBO Max in 2021-2022 starred Cristin Milioti (The Penguin, Black Mirror) as a woman whose attempts to escape her dysfunctional marriage to an eccentric tech billionaire (Billy Magnussem) are complicated by the fact that she has a chip designed to spy on every aspect of her life, including her emotions, implanted in her brain. Made for Love was delightfully original and would absolutely fit in with a Severance-adjacent streaming binge, except it’s no longer available on Max— and is in fact not streaming legally anywhere. It also, frustratingly, never got a physical media release.
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