Kafka Meets Christopher Nolan In Apple TV’s Returning 95% RT Sci-Fi Masterpiece

Published Sep 12, 2026, 1:00 AM EDT

Dhruv is a Lead Writer in Screen Rant's New TV division. He has been consistently contributing to the website for over two years and has written thousands of articles covering streaming trends, movie/TV analysis, and pop culture breakdowns.
Before Screen Rant, he was a Senior Writer for The Cinemaholic, covering everything from anime to television, from reality TV to movies.
After high school, he was on his way to become a Civil Engineer. However, he soon realized that writing was his true calling. As a result, he took a leap and never looked back.

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Franz Kafka remains one of the greatest literary figures to popularize surreal and absurdist stories about horrifying bureaucratic systems. Meanwhile, Christopher Nolan's filmography keeps growing from strength to strength because of his incredible ability to blend complex ideas with deeply human stories. Apple TV's greatest sci-fi show, Severance, combines the tenets of storytelling adopted by both powerhouses.

Created by Dan Erickson, Apple TV's Severance premiered in 2022 and instantly garnered almost unanimous acclaim from viewers and critics. On the production end, Severance has always been significantly slower than most other popular sci-fi shows. Its third season is expected to premiere in 2027, which will be nearly half a decade after its season 1.

Yet, each new installment of Severance is so incredibly imaginative, bizarre, and compelling that it is hard to give up on the series. While Severance is an original TV series, one can find traces of everything from Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind to The Backrooms in its storytelling and visuals. However, beyond these surface-level elements, the show seems to heavily draw from Kafka and Nolan's works.

Severance Combines Kafka’s Surrealism & Absurdism With Nolan’s Sci-Fi Vision

Largely directed by Ben Stiller, Severance operates as an intersection between Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmare and Christopher Nolan’s cerebral, rule-bound sci-fi. Like almost all Kafka stories, Severance, too, features characters who are trapped in an incomprehensible overarching system where bureaucracy itself is a surreal antagonist.

For instance, in Kafka's The Castle, the main character, K., struggles to understand the inscrutable authority that governs his world through absolute power. Something similar happens in Severance. Lumon Industries looms over its entire world, and, yet, neither the characters nor the viewers seem to know what company actually does.

Even the unreasonable punishments the "innies" are forced to endure remind one of the absurd judicial process and bizarre self-justice systems captured in Kafka's The Trial. The mysterious nature of the work done by the "innies" in Lumon is also reminiscent of Kafka's portrayal of meaningless labor in his stories.

Speaking of "innies" and "outies," Severance drops a fixed set of sci-fi rules that define its portrayal of psychological compartmentalization. Similar to Christopher Nolan's Inception, it establishes how strict spatial rules and sensory "kicks" dictate characters' transition between states of consciousness. Similar to Tenet and Interstellar, the show even plays with ideas surrounding subjective time and alternate realities.

Severance Is One Of The Greatest Sci-Fi Shows Of The Century (But It Has 1 Issue)

©Apple TV/Courtesy Everett Collection

In its two-season runtime, so far, Severance has not delivered one dull episode. This explains why it boasts a near-perfect critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Given how it has already avoided the sophomore slump despite setting a high bar with season 1, even its upcoming installment is expected to maintain its storytelling momentum.

However, Severance's biggest issue has always been its release schedule. The show's season 2 came out almost three years after the opening installment. It looks like season 3, too, will take more than two years to premiere after season 2, and it is probably not even the show's final installment.

Reports even suggest that a Severance spin-off is being planned. At its current release pace, however, the Severance franchise might last a single human's entire lifespan. Hopefully, the Apple TV show's production issues will gradually subside, and it will eventually leave behind the same legacy as Christopher Nolan and Franz Kafka's works.

Severance

8/10

A psychological thriller series featuring Adam Scott as Mark Scout, an employee at Lumon Industries who undergoes a "severance" procedure to separate work from his personal memories. However, as his work and life personas mysteriously begin to collide, it quickly becomes clear that not all is as it seems.