'Severance' and the best tech dystopia shows

Humans, meet robots, meet a topsy-turvy near-future

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published 18 April 2025

The second season of the Apple TV+ science-fiction series "Severance" was a cultural phenomenon, and it might be a long time before season three comes around. But there are other shows with similarly dystopian visions of our technological future. The rules of the genre are that the series should be set either in the future or in a present visibly changed by technology but not completely upended by an apocalypse.

'Black Mirror'

Charlie Brooker's long-running anthology series, which returns for a six-episode seventh season on April 10, is known for its sometimes melancholic, sometimes terrifying meditations on the march of technology through society, including "San Junipero," where the elderly can disappear into simulated past realities, and "Joan is Awful," which offered a prescient look at a Netflix-like network using artificial intelligence to instantly and hellishly turn one woman's life into a TV show. It was an episode that "ruthlessly mines the seam of existential dread within the viewer that most of us would generally prefer to stay undisturbed," said The Guardian. (Netflix)

This underappreciated black satire of Silicon Valley weirdos starred Cristin Milioti as Hazel Green, who is trying to get away from her billionaire husband, Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen). After spending the "entirety of their years-long marriage ensconced in a massive VR structure that can simulate any place on the planet," said Mashable, Hazel wants out. But Byron implanted a chip in Hazel's brain and won't let her go. The show "manages to do what so much satire does not and out-weird its own subject," said The Ringer. The show was canceled after its second season in 2022. (Max)

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This 2019 limited series is "set in a horrifying potential version of right now," said The New Yorker. It's reality that traces one family's travails as the "economy crumbles, the ice caps melt, authoritarianism rises and teenagers implant phones into their hands." The U.K.-set series includes a climate-driven refugee crisis and a brief nuclear war, but its most disturbing element might be the determination by teenaged Bethany (Lydia West) to become "transhuman" by implanting various tech gadgets in her body. The show explores "what it would mean for humans to become data or to exist forever in the cloud," said Slate, and viewers might not like the answer. (Max)

Before he turned to a potential second American domestic cataclysm in 2024's "Civil War," director Alex Garland helmed the 2020 tech dystopia mini-series "Devs." In the show, developers are working on something mysterious for a company called Amaya, whose offices have a "spooky-minimalist" vibe and where a "colossal statue of a little girl bestrides the campus, her eyes glassy and piercing like a nightmare doll's," said The New York Times. The prize is an "accurate simulation of how" both things and people are created, "projecting past and future events like a time travelling crystal ball," said Digital Spy. The result is " stunningly ambitious" but also "impossible to write about in a review," said Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert. (FX)

"Humans" is set in a parallel present where "potentially sentient androids — called synths, or synthetics — are everywhere in regular society," said Vulture. The plot revolves around the decision of Joe (Tom Goodman-Hill) to join the "people of this fictional Great Britain" in buying a synth named Anita to "make lunch for the kids and do laundry," said Den of Geek. Over the course of three seasons, the family grapples with "complicity in the Synths' degradation" and in the process "provides a mirror through which we can consider the injustices in our own world," said Vox. (AMC)

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David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.