A Key Severance Episode Has A Steven Spielberg Reference Fans Didn't Notice

In the "Severance" episode "The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design," Mark (Adam Scott) joins his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) at a special birthing retreat where she aims to give birth to her daughter. The retreat is a distant cabin built to encourage a nurturing, relaxed atmosphere, and both Mark and Devon kind of scoff at the hippy-dippiness of it all. The retreat was mostly the idea of Devon's self-help author husband, Ricken (Michael Chernus).

While going through her contractions, Devon wanders the cabins. She sees another expectant mother, Gabby (Nora Dale) also in the midst of birthing pains, in the cabin next door. She knocks on the door and is welcomed inside to share a cup of coffee. They converse lightly and warmly, bonding over their mutual pregnancies. It's not until a later episode that Devon learns Gabby was "severed" at the time; that is, a computer chip implanted in Gabby's brain removed all her memories of the outside world while she gave birth, and then, once she left the cabin, the birth itself was blocked out. Gabby, who is wealthy, presumably agreed to undergo the severance procedure to forget her labor pains.

When Devon first met Gabby, "Severance" creator Dan Erickson and episode writer Anna Ouyang Moench cleverly dropped in a line of dialogue that Erickson pinched from Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" (as he admitted in a conversation with Buzzfeed in 2025). Devon, it should be noted, is the most down-to-earth and plainspoken of the "Severance" characters. She doesn't mince words and tends to communicate brusquely. She's admirable for this. When she meets Gabby, she enters Gabby's suite and immediately notes that it's way nicer than hers. "You rich?" Devon asks.

It's in character for Devon to simply ask a rich person if they are, in fact, rich. As Erickson explained to Buzzfeed, the line was his idea:

"[T]here's a line in season 1, where Devon speaks to Gabby at the birthing center: She's looking around, and she goes, 'You rich?' And that's a reference to one of my favorite lines from 'Jaws,' where Chief Brody asks that to Richard Dreyfuss' character. I just always thought that was a funny line. It's just a weird thing to ask someone out of nowhere! It doesn't mean anything, it's just a reference, but I don't I've never seen anybody pick up on that specific thing." 

Chief Brody is, of course, the character played by Roy Scheider in "Jaws." Dreyfuss' character, Matt Hooper, is an oceanographer who is called upon to help when a shark begins feeding on the residents of the summer resort town where Brody lives. Shortly after the two men first meet, the working-class Brody asks Hooper if he's rich, clearly noticing the man's (presumably expensive) education and scientific equipment. It's a tiny moment, as Erickson noted, and isn't one of the better-known moments from the classic film (unlike a certain improvised line), but it has certainly stuck in Erickson's mind.

I would posit that many of the people reading this article have an equally random line of dialogue from a random movie, TV show, or web series stuck in their heads at all times. In fact, they're probably aping an actor's delivery when they say things like "This has never happened before" or "He's the best" or something equally innocuous. Erickson took "You rich?" with him and was able to fold it into the batter of "Severance."

"Severance" is streaming on Apple TV+.