If you haven't seen Severance, you're missing out. The eagerly-anticipated second season of this surreal and dystopian thriller premiered on Apple TV in January, taking viewers once more into the bowels of Lumon, a sinister biotechnology corporation that asks its employees to undergo a neurological procedure known as "severance".
Dividing their consciousness to create a split personality that knows nothing of life outside Lumon's four walls, severed employees effectively become two people inside one body: when they descend the elevator to Lumon's sterile, maze-like basement floor, severed employees lose all sense of identity, and after clocking off at the end of the day, they take no memories of their work home with them.
A story centred on such a disquieting concept demands a score that's equally spine-tingling, and that's something composer Theodore Shapiro has delivered in spades. Severance's theme music masterfully distills the confusion, paranoia and intrigue at the heart of the show through some unconventional harmonic choices, as YouTuber Rick Beato explains in a recent video, embedded above.
Breaking down Severance's opening theme, Beato outlines a chord progression that shifts between the key of C minor and a number of related modes. Starting off with a Cm chord, the sequence makes use of that chord's root note as a pedal point over which three more chords - none of which fit comfortably into C natural minor - then play: F♯ major, F major, and A♭ minor.
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As Beato explains, these chords stray from the tonality implied by the theme's opening: beginning in C minor, the sequence moves through the C Locrian mode and the C Dorian mode before the fourth chord ventures into C harmonic minor. These shifting tonalities combine to conjure a delicious sense of uncertainty that not only captures the emotions experienced by the show's central characters, but also mirrors their predicament: just as the identities of Lumon's workers are uncertain, so is the identity of the theme's key.
Composer Theodore Shapiro spoke about how he developed the theme's creepy mood in an interview with GoldDerby back in 2022. “In this show, we worked with such a minimal palette,” he said.
“A lot of times, what can work best in terms of creepiness is just utter simplicity. Sometimes just a few notes on the piano are enough to be scarier than a 90-piece orchestra doing crazy stuff. I love shows or films that work with a minimal palate like that, so that was a great gift to be able to play in that kind of a sandbox.”
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