Composer Theodore Shapiro was recognized for his work with the BMI Icon Award during the 2026 BMI Film, TV and Visual Media Awards on May 13th in Beverly Hills, California. The award celebrated his incredible body of work, which includes scoring the hit Apple TV series Severance. With actor Adam Scott telling Deadline that season 3 of the show will begin production “very soon,” there’s renewed attention to the show’s main title theme. Shapiro’s harmonically unsettling composition perfectly sets the tone for the show and has “garnered a collection of accolades, including an International Film Music Critics Award, multiple Hollywood Music in Media Awards and back-to-back Emmys,” BMI writes.
To understand the impact of the title theme, you need to know a little about the show’s plot. Severance follows the employees of Lumon Industries, a sinister corporation, whose memories have been “surgically divided between their work and personal lives,” IMDb explains. As such, when they enter work, they have no recollection of their identities or of their lives outside.
Hear the song during the Season 2 opening title sequence:
How Theodore Shapiro’s Severance Theme Uses a C Pedal
Shapiro distills the storyline’s disorientation, confusion, and paranoia into just over a minute and twenty seconds. To achieve this, he reflects the plot’s dissonance with a jarring chord progression over a C pedal note. It begins on a C minor triad, which fits with the C bass note, then immediately moves a tritone away to a Gb triad. That moves down a semitone to an F triad, which contains C as its fifth, making it consonant with the pedal note. Then, Shapiro throws another curveball with an Ab minor triad, which is highly dissonant against the C pedal.
The Modal Shifts Behind the Severance Theme’s Uneasy Sound
Producer and music educator Rick Beato explains that the chords are pulled from different keys. He suggests the first C minor chord implies the C Aeolian, or natural minor, scale. The Gb chord is taken from C Locrian, then the F major triad is from C Dorian. Finally, the A♭ minor chord connects to C harmonic minor by borrowing B natural as its enharmonic equivalent, C♭.
The melody is just as enigmatic, utilizing both the major and minor 7ths of C (B and Bb) to obscure any sense of resolution.
“These shifting tonalities combine to conjure a delicious sense of uncertainty that not only captures the emotions experienced by the show’s central characters, but also mirrors their predicament: just as the identities of Lumon’s workers are uncertain, so is the identity of the theme’s key,” Music Radar explains.
The Severance main title theme begins with solo piano, eventually blossoming with strings, percussion, and bass. The swell builds to a climax before quickly dropping back to only piano. The final seconds sound like a computer glitching out, adding to the mystery.
Overall, it’s the piano’s lonely tones that drive the emotions, Shapiro says.
“In this show, we worked with such a minimal palette,” Shapiro told Gold Derby. “A lot of times, what can work best in terms of creepiness is just utter simplicity. Sometimes, just a few notes on the piano are enough to be scarier than a 90-piece orchestra doing crazy stuff. I love shows or films that work with a minimal palette like that, so that was a great gift to be able to play in that kind of a sandbox.”
