This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest, Adam Scott, is best known for his work in TV comedies like Parks and Recreation and Party Down, and the drama series Big Little Lies.

Now he stars in the new drama series Severance that gives a sci-fi take on work-life balance.

Adam Scott spoke with Fresh Air's Anne Marie Bulldoinato. Here's Anne Marie.

Chances are you've seen actor Adam Scott in a TV workplace. On Parks and Recreation he plays Ben Wyatt, government worker and love interest for Leslie Noep, played by Amy Puller.

On the cult favorite party down, he plays Henry, an actor who never quite made it, so has to work as a bartender for a catering company.

Now Adam Scott is the star of a sci-fi drama called Severance, which takes place in a more sinister workplace. He plays Mark S, a guy still grieving for his wife who died in a car accident years ago.

Unable to return to work as a professor because of his grief, he decides to work for the company Lumen, a mysterious conglomerate that performs a controversial surgery on some of its employees.

Workers can choose to get a chip implanted in their brain that makes them forget about their personal lives when they're at work and their work lives when they're at home.

Ben's stiller co-created Severance and directs a lot of the episodes. It also stars Patricia Arquette, John Turturo and Christopher Walken.

Here's a scene from the show. Mark, played by Adam Scott, is in his outside life. He's at a bar on a blind date. They're getting to know each other when his date, played by Nikki James, asks about his job.

So Lumen? Yeah. Like half this town.

And half with me, that was a joke. It was funny. Yeah. I mean, the Archives Division, sort of a corporate historian, apparently.

So a lot of sensitive material. Hence the...

So you don't know who you work with or what you do or anything. Yeah, that's the idea.

What if he's not going to know? Can't sneak notes.

So... You could have a girlfriend at Lumen and not know it. And if you met someone out here, you wouldn't know it in there.

Like you could get married and have kids and just forget the exist for eight hours every day for your whole life. That doesn't mess with your head.

I think for some people it's the point.

Adam Scott, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you, Emory. It's obvious that, you know, office work culture has changed.

Like pre-pandemic, there was this fear that, you know, because of technology, people would be working all the time, you know,

leaving little time for outside life. And with the pandemic, those lines between the two have gone kind of beyond blurred.

And people are really reconsidering what work means, how much time one should work, how much of their lives should be devoted to it.

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