When Severance used “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in Season 2, Episode 7 (Chikhai Bardo), which aired February 28, 2025, the choice looked controversial only if you froze time in 2018.
If you remember there was a very brief controversy in 2018 framed around consent, radio pullbacks, and an outsized media backlash narrative.
At RewindOS we don’t know if the team over at Apple TV refined their data in this structured way or if indeed the 2018 controversy ever even came up in the writer’s room or the legal department.
So with that being said this project set out to answer a simple question:
By late February 2025, was this song actually risky to use?
My original thought was no. Not only was it not risky to use, but nobody had even mentioned it after the episode aired, and if you sort through the various subreddits run by eagle-eyed severance fans who discuss all things Severance in very detailed posts, you will get an idea of where I am going with this, how I got there, and how it can be recreated for just about any type of RewindOS Cultural Safety Framework that I will be developing to apply to other shows, quotes, actors, or songs.
How I built this:
This analysis draws on two independent signals to assess whether “Baby It’s Cold Outside” remained culturally risky by the time Severance aired in 2025.
1. Google Trends: Controversy Decay
Search interest was tracked for multiple controversy-framed queries related to the song from 2018 through 2025. using manual searches and then a larger python code. The data shows:
- a clear but small peak during the 2018 radio pullback news cycle
- rapid decay in the months that followed
- no secondary spikes or resurfacing in subsequent years
By 2020, controversy-related search interest had returned to baseline and remained there through 2025.
2. Reddit: Social Engagement & Backlash Check
Reddit posts were collected using public JSON search endpoints across within a python code that produced the following outputs:
- broad references to the song and Severance / Apple TV
- narrow “backlash” framings (e.g., banned, problematic, controversy)
- subreddits where this discussion would be most likely to appear
Weekly aggregation shows effectively no sustained discussion following the episode’s release. Only one post referenced the song in connection with Severance, and it discussed narrative tension rather than offense.
The absence of engagement is itself the result. I was surprised to see the one post which featured the song as part of a long implied consent piece but this post did not show until March 6, 2025 a week after the episode aired and the post itself only generated three comments of discussion none about the song itself.
Again, Whether or not Apple TV explicitly modeled this risk, guessed, or just didn’t care. We don’t know, but the outcome reflects what the data already showed and how others can use it. This is what cultural data intelligence looks like when measured instead of guessed.
If you want to see or run the Python script used for this analysis, the full repository is here:
👉 GitHub: https://github.com/jjf3/rewindos_measuring_cultural_safety
📄 Download the White Paper here: https://rewindos.com/index.php/white-papers/the-rewindos-cultural-safety-framework/
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