By Herb Scribner, The Washington Post
When it comes to “Severance,” there’s a lot we don’t know. What is Cold Harbor? What are all of those goats for? Why does Adam Scott’s hair look like that?
But here’s another mystery: Do dogs hate this show?
Some fans of the hit Apple TV series – a surreal workplace thriller that is fast approaching the conclusion of its second season – have noticed their pets getting worked up when “Severance” is on in their homes. Dogs have barked at the elevators or at the sound of key cards being swiped. One Reddit user described how her dog, who is normally calm at night, will pace around the home and whimper whenever “Severance” is on the TV. On TikTok, several viewers reported that their dog went into hiding after they watched the show.
“My biggest concern was thinking something was wrong with my dog, and then feeling guilty when I realized it was the show,” says Mikayla Souza. She said her golden retriever, Knox, typically only gets scared of smoke detectors. But when she watched “Severance,” the dog was “pacing, whining, crying, unable to settle, and hiding in the other room.”
“I still love the show,” she said in an interview, “but only watch with AirPods or subtitles now so Knox doesn’t get scared.”
It was a similar case for Chris Padgett. Normally, Padgett’s dog, Rosco, cuddles up next to him when they watch TV. But after watching a few episodes of “Severance” one night, Padgett noticed his dog was lying on the floor on the opposite side of the house. The next night, Rosco did the same thing.
“I didn’t piece it all together until the third night, when he climbed into my lap and shook,” Padgett told The Washington Post. “I paused the show and patted him until he calmed down and eventually fell asleep.”
“We’ve only ever seen him shake when getting into the bath or going to the vet,” he said.
John Hickey, a creative director from Palm Springs, California, says that his dog, Payton, who rarely freaks out when the TV is on, would act oddly during her owner’s nighttime “Severance” viewings: She cuddled up next to him. “I thought it was a little strange,” Hickey told The Post. “She likes to normally sleep on the couch or on the ground.”
The series follows the workers and overlords at Lumon, a company that straddles the line between dull corporate behemoth and sinister religious cult. The main characters work as data “refiners,” staring at numbers and sorting the ones that seem scary into virtual bins to some unknown end. They and others working on the same floor (including members of a goat-raising department called Mammalians Nurturable) are “severed” – meaning they’ve had a medical procedure that divides their consciousness between their work-selves (“innies”) and their non-work-selves (“outies”). The elevators at Lumon serve as portals between these different selves, with characters transitioning from one consciousness to another between floors.
During the second season’s second episode, when the characters go up and down the elevator in quick succession, Hickey says all the beeping triggered Payton.
“My dog freaked out and she leaped off her bed, leaped to me, was trying to hide behind me,” he says. He went online and saw that he and Payton weren’t alone.
What in the name of Kier is going on here?
Like a rogue data refiner in Lumon’s subterranean hallways, The Post went looking for answers.
Unable to contact the Mammalians Nurturable department at Lumon, we asked some pet experts on this side of the screen to help us out. According to them, there are certain sounds that might come from a TV show that will stand out to dogs: Dogs look for any instinctual sounds – such as the sound of another dog or a wolf. “A loud, low-pitched sound may instinctively tell a dog that a predator is nearby, causing them to be naturally fearful,” said Jennifer Skiff, the director of international programs for the anti-animal cruelty group Animal Wellness Action.
Canines also pick up on environmental noises, like cats meowing or birds chirping, according to Courtney Campbell, a veterinary surgeon. “It can be very stimulating,” he said. And our canine friends can also hear sounds that we can’t.
“We all know from having a dog whistle when we were younger that they can hear … in higher frequencies. They’re way too high-pitched for us to hear, but dogs can hear that,” Campbell said.
Jacob Ribicoff, the rerecording mixer for “Severance,” said he did not mix any sounds like that in the show – at least, not intentionally. But the sounds he did use offered some clues about what dogs might be responding to.
“Even though [executive producer] Ben Stiller and the team tend to favor low end sounds, I consistently used some high pitched sounds,” Ribicoff said via email.
“These would happen around the elevator transitions, the high pitched beep for the card scan, the elevator dings (which are airplane alert dings), and the fritzy sound you hear when you see the characters’ eyes fluttering at the moment of transition [between selves],” he explained. “That sound is a combination of crackly static and tiny, sharp, high-pitched tones.”
Aha!
The sounds of “Severance” aren’t the only aspects of the show that could be getting the dogs’ attention. The visual language might also speak to them. Many writers and critics have noted how often “Severance” uses blue, and the show’s cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné has confirmed the blue palette is used to show off themes of calmness and order at Lumon. Blue is a color that dogs have a tendency to notice above others, according to multiple experts.
Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s school of veterinary medicine, has done research on visual perception for dogs. She said a show displayed on older televisions would appear like “old movie screens” to dogs with individual flickers and a low refresh rate. Modern televisions, though, offer more flow and smooth projection.
In fact, television refresh rates have gotten so good that dogs might not know that what they see on TV is fake, she said. “We totally know it’s a virtual space and we’re just enjoying it,” Mowat said. “Whereas, I would say for the most part, dogs don’t make that strong reality versus virtual differentiation.”
Whether it explains what’s going on here, that last dog fact feels very “Severance.”
On the other hand, your dog’s reaction to “Severance” might have less to do with the audiovisual effects of the show than its effect on you.
Ribicoff, the sound mixer, described the ways in which its aural landscapes are designed to work on humans. “The key in this show is to go from the ordinary to the surreal, which can be creepy and unsettling,” he told The Post.
This is especially true in scenes set at Lumon, where “we go from ordinary room tones, fluorescent light hums, and computer whirring sounds to menacing environmental sounds drawn from breathing and other pulsating tones,” Ribicoff said.
Watching can be stressful for humans. And dogs can smell cortisol, a hormone produced from stress, experts said – which might make them feel anxiety, too. In other words, if “Severance” makes you anxious, you might make your dog anxious.
“Your actions as the human in the room are often way more salient to the dog than anything else that’s going on,” Mowat said, “because you have an extremely strong social bond with your animal, and you may be somewhat unaware of that.”
At The Post, while our innies write about the news, our outies are “Severance” watchers who own dogs. I’ve seen my dog bark at Adam Scott’s face during the show, and start to howl into the night once the episode gets underway (that might be the coyotes a few blocks away, but who knows!). The Post’s own Emily Eng tells me her dog, Scooter, leaves the room to hide and quietly cries whenever she watches the show, too.
“Scooter will be happy to know that other dogs also react this way and that he’s not just a big baby,” Eng says.
But like the mysteries surrounding Lumon, operation Cold Harbor and the Eagan family, we may never know the answers to why some people’s dogs are so adverse to the show. All we can do is keep refining the data and pointing out which numbers scare us – or our pets.