Leonard Bernstein, a composer largely beloved in America today, wasn’t always comfortable in his own country. Two of his operas, Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place, took aim at the dark underbelly of the alienating suburban environment that was already breaking apart during the 1960s and 1970s. His Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers and Dancers opened the Kennedy Center in 1971 with controversy, though today it is considered a masterpiece about idealistic people blindly following a Christ figure. It’s ironic that the theater that welcomed his ambitious and critical music is now being managed by a Svengali-like leader.

If you watch the most critically acclaimed television satires that entertain Americans today, you will notice that they, too, portray a troubled world that seems tranquil and Edenic to many viewers. Their sets may as well have been designed by the attractive decorators at HGTV, and their actors look uncannily like reality TV personalities. The 1% are shown playing in their native habitats in series like The White Lotus and Succession, while other hard-hitting series like Paradise and Severance present dystopian environments so eerily clean, antiseptic, and surreal that architects have begun to notice the cleverness of their art directors. It turns out that Severance, the Apple TV series directed by Ben Stiller, is being filmed in Eero Saarinen’s partially renovated Bell Laboratories Building (1959–62) in Holmdel, New Jersey, a building praised for its innovative courtyards and hallways that fostered interaction between employees. Characters in the show are hollow-eyed and scared of each other, never making eye contact at all. The mirror-glass facades reflect a snowy, vacant landscape of near empty parking lots. Midcentury Modern isn’t as cool, fun and sexy as it was in Mad Men. Something sinister is going on.

Like everyone else, I got hooked on these dramedies during the pandemic, but I didn’t expect to find myself thinking often that I was watching a Wes Craven slasher flick, having trouble sleeping after the weekly episode or at the end of a binge. Even last decade’s hits, Survivor and Scandal, were relatively tame compared to what we have been seeing on Hulu’s extraordinary Paradise, though presidents are the center of all three series. If art is imitating life in these well-produced and brilliantly written social commentaries, how close are we to seeing them played out in real time before our eyes?

It is worth looking closely at the architecture and urban settings that have been so painstakingly created by Hollywood to understand how a public trapped behind lawns, well-clipped hedges, and gated mansions can feel as though they are threatened by imminent death. Yes, death, not simply harm. And violent death at that, not a gradual succumbing to a lethal pandemic. The fear that was kept at arm’s length after 9/11 is now at the doorstep. American Beauty was a rose-tinted movie that concealed its perversions. White Lotus and Severance leave them out in the open.

The sumptuous and decadently beautiful resorts that Mike White has chosen for his three Agatha Christie–like murder mysteries aren’t simply photographed and soundtracked. They are worshipfully, compulsively, minutely documented in dazzling color, with the highest resolution digital lenses, in closeups, underwater views, drone shots, and long tracking sequences—every technological gimmick available to a filmmaker today. That’s part of the storytelling. White isn’t afraid to show the evil that exists behind the near-perfect aura of glamor and success. We are looking at wealth under a microscope, seeing dirt under manicured nails and toxins in the mud baths. The corrosiveness of money and power is everywhere, even behind a spectacular Hawaiian sunset or the lush jungles of Thailand. He also delights in revealing art and architecture, paying attention to all the symbolism present in a Sicilian villa or a Thai monastic shrine.

Severance is chilling in every possible respect: cold-hearted plutocrats manipulate their puppet minions for profit. The nuclear winter is upon us. The interiors of classic IBM, General Motors, and US Steel office suites wrapped in faceless glass facades are depicted not as workspaces for busy corporate bureaucrats, but as prisons, cages, torture chambers. There are no bean bag chairs, ping-pong tables, or coffee bars. But there is a “wellness room” and free melon for good behavior. A corporate retreat offers winter tent camping in what could be a Caspar David Friedrich painting. And, yes, the Lumon Corporation art collection is also pretty creepy, though it is curated by a smiling, good-natured Christoper Walken. Britt Lower’s “innie” character is a sensitive, empathetic, and passionate woman; her “outie” version is a cold, greedy, controlling scion of the corporate dynasty. (It’s no coincidence that AT&T’s technology and hardware companies became Lucent Technologies after divestiture.) As an employee of the company, my late wife worked in a building that looked very similar to the settings in Severance for several years. At times, after she returned from work, I had to remind her that her real persona was not that of a public relations writer but of a loving wife and mother. No wonder I feel like Big Brother is watching after spending another hour in Lumon headquarters with my “innie” friends. Still, I keep coming back.

If you are old enough to remember the New York metro area prior to 1982, the year that AT&T dissolved, you will recognize the kind of Saab-driving, Brooks Brothers–suited corporate commuters that lived in Greenwich, Basking Ridge, Scarsdale, or Bedford as models for the characters in Severance. John Cheever wrote about them in his bitter, scotch-soaked short stories. John Updike skewered them in his novels. You will see the cookie-cutter houses they lived in, white clapboard facades and manicured gardens, as telltale signs of an America that was rich, self-satisfied, and fat with profits from a century on top of the world. That’s the country today’s conservative politicians want to recreate, but can’t after half a century of decline. Severance writer/producer Dan Erickson knows it, and he’s forcing us to look at it through the barrel of a gun.

If, while watching Paradise, you think you are walking around Disney’s Florida town, Celebration, then you are the kind of viewer that Hulu wants as a subscriber. We are one step removed from Leave It to Beaver, and Hollywood has set its sights on The Truman Show to find an appropriate setting for a post-apocalyptic town located under a mountain in Colorado. Though there are plenty of “regional, traditional, and classical” buildings rendered in synthetic materials in the town of Paradise, there are also high-tech, modernist government offices, libraries, schools, and cultural centers. These are the kinds of buildings one might find in Cupertino, California, or Stamford, Connecticut, today. Silicon Valley oligarchs like living in lavish Spanish Colonial–style mansions and working in Norman Foster–designed glass and titanium “campuses” nearby. All of the turf is artificial, of course. 

The fictional U.S. president has moved from the White House to one of these mansions following some kind of planet-scorching catastrophe, and his son goes to school in a gleaming, modern building nearby where he can find in the library any book ever written—from the Google archive, of course. The president’s boss, a female version of Elon Musk code-named “Sinatra,” also likes having her nuclear family in a traditional house and her computers in a glass cube. There, she can keep an eye on rogue Secret Service agents who are snooping around trying to figure out why a group of billionaires convinced the government to allow most of the U.S. population to fry while saving about 25,000, mainly white, citizens to move to “safety” under a concrete dome that looks like the sky. Like Elon, she just wants to help humanity using cutting-edge technology, and has the money to buy the best software engineers to help her do it. But her people are living on a knife-edge—and feeling the blade close to their throats.

Show creator Dan Fogelman and actor Sterling K. Brown have collaborated brilliantly to bring this anti-utopian story to life in the midst of one of the most dangerous periods in modern history. How long will it be before powerful forces in Washington and Silicon Valley notice they are being roasted on a spit? Will former military and Secret Service agents take to our streets to reclaim the high ground, as Brown and his friends do? Will Amazon employees find themselves drugged and hypnotized into subservience while their warehouse HVAC systems malfunction? Will the new Meta campus feature surveillance and wristbands for every employee like those in The Circle? How about your beloved iPhone? What is happening while it counts your steps? How many little cameras will be watching you while you do your job at the Post Office? Will special government employees, loyal to our new emperor and his court jester, be granted lavish vacations in Thailand, Hawaii, or Sicily? There is indeed trouble in Tahiti. Beware the poisonous snakes, but look under your towels at the spa. There may be a gun. 

Featured image from Severance, via AppleTV+.