Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Connectivity: Severance
- Tuesday, October 14, 2025 / 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (50 minutes)
- With Anna Ouyang Moench (writer)
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Director: Ben Stiller
Starring: Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, John Turturro, Tramell Tillman
The acclaimed psychological thriller/workplace satire Severance follows the employees of Lumon Industries, who undergo a surgical procedure to split their memories between work and home, in an attempt to achieve a perfect work-life balance. But as the severed workers begin questioning their confinement, they uncover the unsettling activities and hidden histories behind the company for which they work. As part of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-2026 programming series Connectivity, we are pleased to present the Season 2, Episode 4 standout “Woe’s Hollow,” which finds the Macrodata Refinement team taken on an eerie outdoor retreat and team-building exercise in the snowy landscape of the Dieter Eagan National Forest. In this wintry isolation, they must navigate fraught alliances and moments of solidarity, banding together even as they face betrayals and startling revelations, culminating in an explosive confrontation between the workers and the corporate leadership of Lumon Industries.
Writer Anna Ouyang Moench joined moderator Miguel Penabella (Carsey Wolf-Center, UCSB) for a screening and discussion of her Severance episode “Woe’s Hollow” (Season 2, Episode 4).
Biographies
Anna Ouyang Moench (writer)
Anna Ouyang Moench is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. Her plays have been produced at La Jolla Playhouse, Williamstown Theatre Festival, NAATCO/The Public Theater, the Geffen Playhouse, the Playwrights Realm, East West Players, InterAct Theater, Theater Mu, and many other theaters across the country and around the world. Anna wrote for Severance Seasons 1 and 2 on Apple TV+, including the episode “Woe’s Hollow,” and she is currently an executive producer of Beef Season 2 on Netflix. She is developing projects with A24, Onyx Collective, and Fifth Season, and was a member of the pilot cohort of the WarnerMedia Access Showrunner Program. Anna lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Moderator Miguel Penabella (Carsey-Wolf Center, UCSB)
Miguel Penabella is Assistant Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines conspiracy, spectrality, and melancholia as theoretical frameworks for examining historical revisionism in the Philippines and the links between former presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte. He is also interested in theorizations of cinematic temporality and slowness. He is a former coordinating editor of Media Fields Journal.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Presents: Connectivity
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivity examines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term “connectivity” often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue.
CWC TV
In recognition of the extraordinary accomplishments of the Center’s namesakes, Dick Wolf and Marcy Carsey, the Carsey-Wolf Center is committed to examining television as an institution, industry, and cultural form. In our post-network, multi-channel, multi-media environment, understanding television demands understanding its past as well as its future, through exploration of individual episodes, mini-series, and documentaries.