Where exactly does the layoff take place?

Mild spoilers for “The Layoff” Season 2 follow.

The world of “unplugging”. is in many ways very similar to our own. The general level of technology (dismissal procedure excluded, of course) is comparable, most people's lives look the same, and while there is some variation in style in terms of fashion and decor, the series is intended to reflect the modern day, to reflect the most types of today. This relatability is about the city where the show takes place, but where exactly should it be? The answer is a bit complicated.

More information on “Seaverance” season 1 Identify the city as Kier, named after the founder of Lumon Industries. Specifically, the news site clips and the zip code for the city is Kiers, PE, the second part is the state abbreviation. Of course, anyone who lives in the US will tell you that there is no real country in America that uses the abbreviation PE. Like the city, the country is completely fictitious. That said, there are some clues both in the show and around the production that suggest where it's supposed to be found on the mainland.

In “Severance” Season 2, Episode 1, new MDR employee Gwendolyn Y. (Alia Shawkat) asks Mark (Adam Scott) if he knows where the office is, and she mentions that the three of them put “Wyoming” in their investment survey in Area It refers to a series of questions asked of new demolishers that include “what state or territory were you born in?” and “Name any country or territory”. In Season 1, when Helly (Britt Lower) takes a survey, she can't say where she was born, but she names Delaware when asked to name any state. It's likely a question that Gwendolyn answered in “Wyoming,” which means it doesn't really reveal anything new about the show's location.

The new MDR employees briefly introduced at the beginning of Season 2 are all brought in from other branches, at least one of which we're told by Mark W. (Bob Balaban) was closed. This means that Gwendolyn would have taken her input survey at a different branch, further negating the significance of the “Wyoming” response.

While what we see from the city is certainly cold enough to be Wyoming, it's more likely meant to exist somewhere in the American Northeast. The whole company town vibe, with corporate sponsored housing and a huge percentage of the population working in Lumon, evokes an earlier era of industrial America. In Season 1, we're told that Mark's first completed file in the MDR, which is commemorated by a small decoration on his desk, was called Billy Joel's 1982 Anthem. Season 2 contains an MDR file titled “Cold Harbor,” which could be either a reference to the Battle of Cold Harbor, which took place during the American Civil War just six years before the founding of Lumon, or possibly to Cold Spring Harbor, a town in New York state that was also the title of Billy Joel's first album. Of course, it's not clear if file names have any deeper meaning at all.

Much of “The Layoff” is filmed in New York's Hudson Valley, specifically in the city of Kingston. Mark also says that he used to be a professor at a university in the town of Ganz, which is very similar to Ganz, a real-life community in western Pennsylvania.

Since the “layoff” takes place in a city named after the founder of Lumon Industries, it would make sense to be the original, or at least the headquarters. This idea is supported by the Eagan Family spending so much time there in Season 1 and Mark W.'s comment in Season 2 Episode 1 about the Kier branch's eternal wing being older than his old office. However, in the same episode, Kier's office is referred to as Branch 501.

The town of Kier itself adds an interesting wrinkle to the whole mystery. Since the company was founded after the Civil War – a period of great westward expansion – it would have made more sense for Kier to have established a town a little further west, as the northeast was already full of established communities. This means that we don't even know when the town was named Kier, and it could have been longer after the company was actually founded. Inside “Lay-off” season 2Episode 2, Mark W. says he broke his lease in Grand Rapids for his Lumon job, which means he moved from Michigan. Of course, considering that one of MDR's other new tenants is Italian, that doesn't say much about Kiera's proximity to Grand Rapids.

While it's fun to speculate, the fictional nature of the “layoff” world makes it impossible to say for sure where the show is going. Many of these threads are probably intentional red herrings to stimulate discourse, and the larger point is a particular kind of American as a backdrop to sinister corporate plots.