7 Best Shows Like Severance for Corporate Mystery and Mind-Bending Sci-Fi

Severance turns office life into a disturbing mystery. Created by Dan Erickson, the Apple TV series follows employees whose work memories are surgically separated from their personal lives. What begins as a strange corporate experiment becomes a tense story about identity, control, grief, friendship, and the cost of escaping yourself.

If you are searching for shows like Severance, this list focuses on the parts that make the series special: controlled workplaces, unreliable realities, secretive institutions, slow-burning suspense, and characters fighting to understand who they really are. Each recommendation offers a different taste match, so you can choose your next watch based on mood rather than genre alone.

1. Homecoming (2018)

Taste Match: Corporate Conspiracy + Memory Mystery + Psychological Thriller

Best For: Viewers who loved Severance’s quiet tension and suspicious workplace rules.

Expectation: Expect controlled conversations, missing memories, visual clues, and a conspiracy that becomes more disturbing with every episode.

Homecoming follows Heidi Bergman, a counselor working at a facility designed to help soldiers return to civilian life. Years later, she struggles to remember why she left the program. A government investigation slowly reveals that the workplace was hiding something much darker than its friendly language suggested.

Like Severance, the series uses clean offices, polite managers, and corporate procedures to create fear. Both stories ask whether a person can trust memories shaped by an institution. Homecoming is less surreal, but its compact episodes and careful visual style make it the closest first watch on this list.

IMDb: Homecoming

2. Devs (2020)

Taste Match: Secret Tech Company + Existential Sci-Fi + Slow-Burn Mystery

Best For: Fans who want the philosophical side of Severance pushed much further.

Expectation: Expect hypnotic visuals, unsettling silence, questions about free will, and a technology project hidden from almost everyone.

Software engineer Lily Chan investigates the disappearance of her boyfriend after he joins Devs, the most secretive division of a powerful technology company. The deeper she searches, the more the mystery expands from corporate wrongdoing into a frightening question about reality itself.

Devs shares Severance’s fascination with employees trapped inside a beautiful but threatening corporate system. It is more abstract and scientifically ambitious, while Severance spends more time on office relationships and dark comedy. Choose Devs when you want a colder, more meditative puzzle.

IMDb: Devs

3. Mr. Robot (2015)

Taste Match: Corporate Rebellion + Unreliable Reality + Identity Crisis

Best For: Viewers who connected with the innies fighting a system built to control them.

Expectation: Expect hacking, paranoia, social isolation, bold visual storytelling, and frequent doubts about what is real.

Elliot Alderson is a cybersecurity engineer who becomes involved with a hacker group determined to attack one of the world’s most powerful corporations. His technical skills make him dangerous, but his unstable perception makes every victory and relationship difficult to trust.

Mr. Robot is faster, darker, and more openly rebellious than Severance. Still, both shows center on fractured identity and workers trying to reclaim agency from organizations that define their lives. If Helly’s resistance was your favorite part of Severance, Elliot’s battle should be your next watch.

IMDb: Mr. Robot

4. Silo (2023)

Taste Match: Controlled Society + Forbidden Knowledge + Layered Mystery

Best For: Fans who want another Apple TV mystery built around strict rules and hidden history.

Expectation: Expect a sealed world, dangerous questions, political pressure, and clues that slowly change everything.

Thousands of people live inside a huge underground silo and are told that the outside world is deadly. When engineer Juliette Nichols begins investigating a series of deaths, she discovers that the rules protecting the community may also be preventing anyone from learning the truth.

Silo expands Severance’s controlled office into an entire society. Both series turn curiosity into an act of rebellion and use architecture to make characters feel trapped. The tone is more post-apocalyptic, making it a strong bridge to MovieTaster’s list of TV shows like The Last of Us.

IMDb: Silo

5. Dark (2017)

Taste Match: Puzzle-Box Mystery + Family Secrets + Existential Dread

Best For: Viewers who enjoy building theories and noticing small details.

Expectation: Expect a demanding story, connected timelines, emotional consequences, and very few simple answers.

After a child disappears in the German town of Winden, four families uncover secrets that connect generations. Dark turns its mystery into an intricate story about time, loss, fate, and the desperate choices people make to protect those they love.

Dark does not share Severance’s workplace setting, but it creates the same addictive need to understand a carefully designed system. Both reward close attention and use emotional grief as the heart of a complicated sci-fi puzzle. It is heavier and more complex, so save it for a focused watch.

IMDb: Dark

6. Counterpart (2017)

Taste Match: Divided Identity + Secret Bureaucracy + Espionage Sci-Fi

Best For: Fans fascinated by the difference between an innie and an outie.

Expectation: Expect patient spycraft, parallel lives, moral ambiguity, and excellent dual performances.

Howard Silk is a quiet employee at a Berlin agency who discovers that his organization guards a crossing to a parallel world. On the other side is another version of Howard whose personality and life have developed in a completely different direction.

The innie-outie idea makes Counterpart a natural companion to Severance. Both explore how environment changes identity and whether two versions of one person owe each other anything. Counterpart replaces office satire with espionage, but keeps the emotional tension of meeting the self you might have become.

IMDb: Counterpart

7. Maniac (2018)

Taste Match: Memory Experiment + Retro-Future Design + Emotional Sci-Fi

Best For: Viewers who want Severance’s strange humor with more imagination and warmth.

Expectation: Expect shifting realities, unusual technology, damaged characters, and an emotional friendship inside an experiment.

Annie and Owen join a pharmaceutical trial that promises to repair the mind without therapy. Instead, the experiment sends them through connected dream worlds where their memories, fears, and identities repeatedly change.

Maniac shares Severance’s retro technology, controlled test environment, and interest in separating pain from the person who feels it. It is more colorful and emotionally playful, but reaches a similar conclusion: human connection cannot be reduced to a corporate procedure.

IMDb: Maniac

MovieTaster Taste Map for Fans of Severance

If You Loved the Corporate Conspiracy: Homecoming, Devs, and Mr. Robot.

If You Loved the Innie-Outie Identity Question: Counterpart and Maniac.

If You Loved Building Theories: Dark, Silo, and Devs.

If You Loved the Retro-Future Visual Style: Maniac and Homecoming.

If You Loved Characters Breaking the Rules: Mr. Robot and Silo.

Best First Watch Recommendation: Start with Homecoming for the closest corporate mystery. Choose Counterpart for divided identity, or Dark when you want the most demanding puzzle.

Final Note from MovieTaster

Severance works because its mystery is never only about Lumon. It is about the parts of life people try to escape, the systems that benefit from that separation, and the relationships that make a person feel complete.

These shows like Severance approach that experience from different directions. Homecoming offers memory and corporate control, Counterpart explores two versions of one identity, and Silo turns workplace rules into the laws of an entire world. Pick the taste match that interested you most, and your next mystery is ready.