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By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

“Severance,” the Apple TV serial about a corporation whose employees have agreed to “sever” their workaday minds from their normal streams of consciousness, remembering nothing of office life at home and vice versa, is a show designed to break my heart.

It’s a serial in the tradition of “Lost” or the first season of “True Detective,” or “The X-Files” farther back — an unspooling mystery with science fiction and perhaps supernatural elements, thick with clues that point toward a larger conspiracy or mythology in which the characters find themselves caught up. Some forms of fandom leave me cold (I don’t care about the Easter eggs at the end of the umpteenth Marvel movie, sorry), but when I fall for this kind of “puzzle box” show I fall hard — with the knowledge, hard-earned, that the nature of these shows is to overpromise and then disappoint when the time finally comes to pull the curtain back.

Maybe “Severance” will be the exception; maybe the baby goats and dead seals popping up in the weirder corners of its office dystopia aren’t just like the polar bear on “Lost,” the symbol of a show whose pleased-with-itself mystifications ran ahead of any fundamental plan.

But rather than rehash my issues with the puzzle-box model (which I last discussed when writing about “Yellowjackets,” a show that’s sadly lost my attention), I thought I’d try to talk about what “Severance” is doing right now, without regard to its potential endgame, by offering three possible answers to the question, What is this show actually about?

The simplest answer is that it’s a show about the American way of work, with the severing procedure a savage twist on work-life balance issues, a sci-fi literalization of the idea of specific work identities (and distinct “work........

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