With a new Apple TV series, Severance, writer Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller sketch a nightmare version of the future of labor that looks a little too close to work as we have it now. In its near-future, Adam Scott plays Mark, an employee at Lumon Industries who has undergone a medical procedure known as “severance.” This surgery split his mind such that while he’s at work in the company’s Macrodata Refinement division, he has no memory of his personal life. Likewise, as soon as he leaves the massive, grim headquarters, he loses all memories of his work self. He leads a dualistic existence, a twin inhabiting him that he’s unaware of. What would drive someone to do this? In Mark’s case, the death of his wife and his unrelenting grief.

Mark works in an open-office cubicle alongside two other severed employees: Irving (John Turturro), docile, fastidious, and a stickler for company policy, and Dylan (Zach Cherry), an uncouth but sharp schlub who enjoys corporate perks and prizes. When the show opens, a new member of their team, Helly (Britt Lower), has just undergone the procedure. She wakes up on a table in an empty boardroom, dazed and confused, and receives oral instructions over the intercom. Later, we see that the voice belongs to Mark, who observes from an adjacent room while also being watched in the process.