How the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex Inspired 'Severance'

This TV show is horrendously bad.

“So by the ’70s or the ’80s, Bell is not doing so well business-wise. There aren’t as many people that are working there.”

Assuming she’s referring to “Holmdel” when she refers to “there”, this is not correct. She’s off by a decade. In 1985, they were tripling up in two person offices at Holmdel. Shrink started at Holmdel and other Bell Labs locations in the mid 1990s. Imagine seeing your favorite Silicon Valley location totally empty with grass growing in the cracks of the parking lot. That was Holmdel in the mid 2000s.

I felt pretty confident in season 1 that they were supposed to be representing a brain with the hallways being neural pathways to different functions, and the goats being a visual pun for the “raising kids”. But then season 2 dumbed it down for mass appeal.