Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Media Studies
Reader 1
Alessia Lupo Cecchet
Reader 2
Ryan Engley
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
2024 Sofia Z Buntz
Abstract
Typical prison media, while purporting to represent incarceration and its social meaning to the public, transforms lived realities of state-sanctioned violence into entertainment spectacle and operates under strict material and ideological constraints that prevent it from meaningfully questioning the legitimacy and function of the prison as a built institution. The television series Severance (2022), however, represents incarceration in the form of the dystopian office-prison where the innies are trapped, employing metaserial and science fictional narrative mechanisms to critically implicate the spectator. The show’s science fictional premise links the explicit violence of incarceration to the more subtle form of disciplinary control that is bureaucracy by emphasizing seriality as the logic that coheres them. Drawing on theories of seriality, science fiction worldbuilding, and abolitionist media scholarship, I argue that Severance constructs itself not only as a metaseries but as metaserial dystopia, which represents seriality itself, in its more mundane incarnations as well in its psychological and physical violence, as the narrative origin of the show’s dystopian anxiety.
Recommended Citation
Buntz, Sofia, "Severance as Metaserial Dystopia: Penal Spectatorship and Critical Reintegration" (2025). Scripps Senior Theses. 2497.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2497
