For viewers who are patiently waiting on the next instalment of Severance, one underrated sci-fi mystery makes an ideal temporary replacement for the series. It’s fair to say that sci-fi TV fans are spoiled for choice in 2026. Foundation, Silo, the Monsterverse spinoff Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, For All Mankind, its spinoff Star City, and the upcoming cyberpunk TV series Neuromancer are all exciting, original small-screen sci-fi hits, and that’s just the shows that Apple TV is currently releasing.
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Not only that, but the above rundown doesn’t even include every major sci-fi series from Apple TV. The darkly comic dystopian satire Severance is one of the streaming service’s best shows ever, a mystery box show that gradually moved from workplace comedy to psychological thriller to dark sci-fi throughout its first season. While Severance season 2 made its story even wilder, the long waits between seasons are tough on fans of this acclaimed series. Luckily, Hulu’s under-seen Devs is an ideal replacement.
Hulu’s Devs Is The Ideal Severance Replacement
Penned by Ex Machina writer/director Alex Garland, Devs is a small-screen version of the dark, thoughtful sci-fi Garland brought to cinemas in that 2015 hit, Annihilation, and Civil War. The Hulu series focuses on the story of Sonoya Mizuno’s Lily, a software engineer at a quantum computing company, Amaya. When her boyfriend dies in strange circumstances shortly after joining Amaya’s titular team of developers, Lily gets involved with them to find out the truth about what happened to her late love interest.
As bleak but ambitious as Netflix’s iconic sci-fi mystery Dark, Devs is a powerful piece of storytelling that makes use of the mystery box format pioneered by earlier hits like Lost. Unlike so many sci-fi shows, the series doesn’t throw in wild twists for their own sake, but instead uses a string of increasingly complex revelations about Amaya’s real purpose and Lily’s role in it to gradually unsettle the viewer.
Devs Made Multiverse Storylines Interesting Again
It almost feels unfair to reveal that Devs is a multiverse story, since the series feels like much more than that, but its ability to refresh such an overly familiar sci-fi movie staple is a testament to the 2020 Hulu show’s strengths. With a killer cast including future Civil War collaborators Nick Offerman and Cailee Spaeny, Devs is as tense as it is tragic.
However, the show still finds time for moments of awe and a surprising degree of cautious optimism amid all of the paranoid conspiracies and downbeat plot twists. Smart, unpredictable, and deeply concerned with the state of the tech industry and where it is heading in the future, Devs is perfectly in conversation with Severance as a series.
Unfortunately, the show predated both season 1 of Apple TV’s 2022 hit and streaming’s big-budget sci-fi boom more broadly, meaning Devs never received a renewal or a follow-up after its single season. Like Garland’s earlier flops, Dredd and Annihilation, Hulu’s Devs is a sci-fi story that deserved as much screen time as Severance to expand its inventive fictional world further, but never received this thanks to its swift cancelation.
