Who are you when no one is watching?
Why it is hard sci-fi
A workplace procedural with one technology. Lumon employees can elect a procedure that splits their consciousness between work and personal life. The work self, the innie, has no memory of life outside the office. The personal self, the outie, has no memory of work. The show commits to the rule strictly. Every consequence of the split is followed across seasons. The procedural texture is corporate research, and the show is one of the cleanest portrayals of a single-technology workplace ever made.
Science inside it
A neural-procedure that segments memory by location-and-time triggers, a working corporate research program with a hidden agenda, the legal status of an innie as an entity with limited rights, and the engineering shape of a building designed to enforce the segmentation. The shows working idea is that a sufficiently strong location-bound memory wall produces, in effect, two persons in one body.